Goals
Blue Stakes Vision
The goal was clear: to develop a tool that would empower organizations of all sizes to align their company-wide plans and operations across all teams. By providing a centralized platform for collaboration, communication, and progress tracking, the tool aimed to streamline project management processes and increase efficiency within an organization. The tool would enable teams to work together more effectively, giving managers real-time visibility into project progress, deadlines, and deliverables, helping them to make better-informed decisions and ultimately leading to improved performance and productivity.
The Challenges
Companies around the world are revolutionizing the way we live, work, and interact, as we are currently experiencing a period of unprecedented change.
Businesses are constantly pushing the boundaries of what is possible, creating new and innovative experiences for users. To keep pace with this rapid change, organizations must have the right people and tools in place to support their daily operations.
The need for efficient and streamlined communication protocols, streamlined operations, and progress visibility has never been more pressing. Businesses are realizing that they need to establish better structures and processes to achieve these goals, leading to increased productivity and performance. To accomplish this, organizations must find the right tools to support their teams, both technical and non-technical, as they scale and improve their operations.
The Solution Build a tool that unites teams under a single umbrella
Businesses need a way for their employees to be organized better in order to improve collaboration, save time, and increase productivity using a single management tool. Usually, teams are fragmented across many platforms, GitHub projects, Jira, Zenhub, Coda, etc.
The complexity of managing multiple projects across various tools can hinder the ability of expanding teams to stay aligned, track progress, and achieve cross-team successes. The use of multiple tools for different purposes such as road mapping, bug tracking, dependency mapping, etc can lead to confusion, inefficiencies, and lack of visibility, making it difficult for teams to collaborate and problem-solve effectively. Businesses require a centralized, single tool that can efficiently manage all aspects of project management, acting as a single source of truth for all teams and projects, enabling them to work towards a common goal and increase productivity.
My Role
As the product designer, my role was to design Blue Stakes in a way that addressed the specific needs of businesses looking to keep pace with the rapidly changing landscape of project management.
I conducted user research, gathered feedback, and analyzed competition trends to identify areas for improvement and new features to be added. The goal was to create a product that met the needs of businesses of all sizes and industries, and that would constantly evolve to keep pace with the rapidly changing landscape of project management.
I was responsible for creating a user-centered design that streamlined communication protocols, simplified operations, and provided real-time visibility into project progress. During this time, I worked closely with the development team and other stakeholders to ensure that the tool integrated with other tools and platforms and that it was able to scale and adapt as the business grew.
I also played a key role in developing the product strategy, and I was responsible for creating a design process that was efficient, effective, and easily adaptable. My design decisions and strategy were aligned with the overall product strategy and vision. I lead the design team and collaborated with other stakeholders to ensure the product delivers an exceptional user experience and meets the needs of our customers.
Major Bottle Neck Making everyone happy?
The goal of Blue Stakes was to create a system that would enable large businesses to use the system, without alienating the core user base of small businesses. The tool had to work for everyone from small startups to large corporations. The challenge was to create something that could adapt to the different needs and processes of these different types of businesses, without losing its core functionality and ease of use.
The problem was that by trying to create something for everyone, we risked helping no one. Avoiding the design equivalent of an identity crisis became a big focus of mine. I went around this by finding ways to inject a point of view into the product. By knowing what it wasn't, as well as what it was.
To achieve this goal, I implemented a process of user research. I met with potential and existing customers and analyzed data. This research helped us identify four key insights that guided the design and development of the tool. This process helped us to identify the key features and functionality that were essential for the tool to meet the needs of both small and large businesses, and to make design decisions that were informed by the needs and wants of our users.
Blue stakes would include many new features which was great, but integrating all of these features without careful thought was bound to make the experience too complicated. A lot of effort went into incorporating these new features in a way that would not overwhelm or confuse casual users, while still providing advanced functionality for power users.
For me, a major objective was to design a simple and user-friendly experience for all users, even those who were not familiar with project management tools.
To achieve this, I focused on minimizing the number of steps and inputs required to perform key actions and designed a robust search feature that allows users to easily find what they need across the platform.
For example, you could search for workspaces from the homepage, making it easy for all users to navigate the tool. This approach helps to cater to all types of users and delivers a fast and efficient experience to our users.
At the beginning of the project, I planned to incorporate the concepts of Material Design into Blue stakes, I believed that the elements of Material Design would be a perfect fit for the tool. I worked with our front-end team to implement them into the app. However, it became apparent that the Material Design elements were not robust enough for a large-scale web application especially one with such complexities
Instead, I developed a UI system that could be applied across Blue stake, this approach was successful, as it made it easy for me to consistently design and implement complex features, allowing the team and I to focus on solving the main problem at hand.
A few screens
