Project Companion

SAP Project Companion for Mangers App is an iOS app for Project Managers to manage projects on their mobile devices.  After one year of design and development, the app was officially released in App Store at the end of Mar 2017.

Team & Role

I played the product designer role with another designer through out the project, from defining product, research, concept, wireframs and all the way to final design.

Key Insights From Research

A. Project management is not about knowing if everything is on track, is about knowing if anything is off track.

B. Requesting updates takes too much time

C. Share project status means collecting information from multiple platforms and put them together manually for stakeholders.

According to the research results, we generated some early concepts and identified the key workflows. Since this app is not an independent app, we considered the workflows for both user parties (the PM and the consultants). 

Wireframes & Information Architecture

Overview

Overview provides a list of items that need the user's attention, including tasks that are due soon, new or unresolved issues and tasks with low progress. The user can customize the setting of attention items as needed. Attention items can also be dismissed if they have been addressed. Project cards provide a brief summary of this week's project status. In this way, the app helps users to focus on most important items in current timeframe. If the users need more information, they can tap on the project card to see the details around the project.

Timeline Preview & Timeline

The timeline preview only highlights two upcoming milestones of the project, so that the users can track the project progress without being distracted by other milestones in the project. To view more, the users can tap on the timeline preview to the Timeline screen that includes all the completed milestones and all upcoming planed milestones.

Request Update

When a task has not been updated a long time, the app would provide a few suggestions for user to address the problem. Request Update can be one of the suggestion. Tapping on either the suggestion card or the action button on toolbar brings up the Request Update modal. The notes area is already populated with predefined text with task name so that user doesn't need to type every time. User is able to choose whom to send this request and set a reminder for another update request or subscribe any updates from this task.

Quick report

To reduce the effort of manually updating the project status report, we designed a pdf template in the app for the user to create a project status report quickly. From project detail screen, the user is able to create a quick report in a pdf format and save it into the project detail. The user can edit report name, add summary to the report and decide the content for the report. After the content selection, user can preview the report to make sure everything looks good to go. After the report has been created, the user can use the share function to send the report pdf to stakeholders.

Refelction

Takeaway

This project was my first end-to-end app design project at SAP. The most important lesson I have learned was Navigation should be the first thing to tackle before starting any wireframes, even low fidelity ones. We didn't do a good job on that but spent too much time on the key work flows, which made it hard when designing the landing screen. And I have kept that in mind for all other project afterwards and made it a crucial step in my design process.

What would I do differently?

Redesign the cell for Task and Issues. According to further user testing, users tended to tap on the images to see people profile, however, the cell is one tap target. The other problem is that, users found it hard to tell task from issue, and the project it belongs to. I would use the place currently for image to show icons representing for task/issue and make the project line more prominent instead of blending it with due date