Dynamic Signal is an employee communications platform dedicated towards engaging and activating employees. I joined the Product Team in June 2017, collaborating closely with product managers and engineers to ship new features and refine old ones across iOS, Android, and Web platforms. My first project was with a team of 3 designers to redesign the iOS and Android apps.
For this redesign, we chose to follow a framework in which we wouldn’t create an entirely new design system. Rather, we leveraged the native design systems of each platform -- Material Design Guidelines on Android and Human Interface Guidelines on iOS to design a familiar experience for users accustomed to their mobile devices, respectively.
The purpose for this redesign was to improve the employee's experience of consuming, sharing, and creating content. Here are a few of the user stories we sought to improve:
We wanted to create a cleaner experience as users scrolled through the feed. This required a design system for feed cards and its many variations, optimizing the amount of space used with an edge to edge feed card, and prioritizing the wall of content. In addition, we wanted to ensure that actions were given equal weight to engage with pieces of content: Like, Comment, or Share.
Experiences shouldn't hampered by platform differences. With the mobile redesign, we purposefully made the core experience of iOS and Android the same so employees can experience Dynamic Signal like a common language.
With adaptations to Android, I followed Material Design guidelines to ensure that navigation, error and success states, and the overall feel of the app were in sync with the most seasoned Android user.
Users were confused by the ‘relevance’ sorting in the old design where unread notifications were stacked to the top of the list. As more notifications came, older notifications were easily lost by the odd sorting algorithm. We decided to scrap that sorting method, and instead order notifications by recency. We also updated the UI to emphasize three things: WHO the notification is from, WHAT the notification is, and HOW the user should interact with it.
A huge part of Dynamic Signal’s platform is employee advocacy — making your employees an advocate for your company’s brand. This can be achieved by encouraging employees to share pieces of content that they see in the news feed to their personal social media platforms i.e. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook.
The old design lacked a clear flow for users to share an article to multiple social channels at once. We centered the redesign around a basic principle of content creation: give users a blank slate and allow them to personalize what they would like to say. This gives employees the confidence to share unique content to their personal profiles.
Not only did we refresh the design with a larger profile image and parallax scrolling effect, we realized that much of the unique identifiers taken during onboarding (i.e. location, job description, department) could be surfaced on an employee’s profile. This added a new component to the way employees could identify each other within the app in addition to seeing involvement in a points-based leaderboard or an employee’s sharing activity.
By focusing this mobile redesign on navigation and the most common user stories, we saw a 35% increase in time spent in the app. The funnels guiding users to more detailed pages for posts, the sharing flow, a user's profile, and notifications nearly doubled per user.
This was a rewarding first project at Dynamic Signal where I was able to work within a structured design system, engaging in several user journies to identify pain points within the app, and adapting these flows for a mobile-first experience.
