Introduction

The ReturnToWork platform is designed & built explicitly for safe return of employees in workplaces around the globe and make business continuity and resiliency even stronger for the future. The safety of employees is considered top priority and the primary aim of this platform is to mitigate risks, make data-led decisions following local government and WHO guidelines.

The platform allows employees to manage thier health status, generate E-pass requests to come to workplace, E-token requests and indoor navigation to traverse within spaces inside the workplace and get notified on high risk contact tracing history. The project, workplace and security teams can collaborate to monitor protocols and breaches using advanced analytics coming from BLE tags, beacons, cameras to make it an intelligent monitoring platform where they can plan capacity and make decisions based on data.​

Discover

Challenging the brief

When I was informed about this initiative and asked whether I wanted this to my last project in the organization, I agreed immediately. The opportunity for such a product was brought into light by Dr. Arti Thapliyal. She had approached a group of directors as well as various teams that would be needed to understand the feasibility of such an idea. By the time I came into the picture, the brief was already in place. How do we bring back essential employees to their workspaces? There were certain solutions being thrown at me but I decided to take a step back. The first-step from a user-experience standpoint was to challenge the brief and derive a better design problem statement, which looked more deeply into different facets such as the scalability of the solution.

I had to start off with a few stakeholder interviews and talk to them in separate sessions to understand their perspective, desires, and overall mindset about the situation and product. What was their reason for agreeing to give this project a nod? I discuss in detail some of the answers in the next phase (Research) but, a quick summary was that due to Covid-19, 'Business As Usual' friction was increasing day by day. Employees need Tech support for their laptops almost every day, which becomes impossible if employees in the support department cannot access resources that can get issues resolved. This in turn affects clients and costs the business a lot of money. ​

“No one had predicted this situation, but there is an opportunity here to do good and keep jobs intact.”

It was important to understand the fact that due to the pandemic, a wide array of opportunities presented themselves. The idea dawned on me while taking notes from one of the stakeholders that mentioned the above quote. Apart from my organization helping its employees, we could help every single sector that was affected by the travel restrictions; Ranging from banks to warehouses and call-centers to airports. ​

The revised brief came out along the lines of creating a scalable system that can help transition employees to return to their workspaces, which fits any given business scenario and should allow for easy administration as well as have familiar interaction patterns (due to the difference between the technological literacy of the users). ​

Research

I was able to identify the starting point of my research to be - talking to the stakeholders and understanding their motivation behind such a product (as detailed above). Apart from that, the second most vital part was to brainstorm and classify the potential areas that we needed to understand. These were the major areas of focus:

1. Identifying the essential employees
2. Look at floor plans and infrastructure maps to identify physical touchpoints
3. Safety Protocols
4. Ethical Practices

1. We had listed down several possibilities for essential employees needed on the ground, some of whom were:

• Security Team
• Cafeteria (Kitchen Team)
• Janitors (Cleaning/Support Staff)
• Workplace Team (Floor administration)

2. After analyzing a variety of floor plans (as depicted), several challenges that presented themselves. Monitoring of different tiers, prompts/alerts to defaulters, to name a few. The following are some of the physical touchpoints identified:

• Area Entrance/Exit (to business park)
• Building Entrance/Exit (Designated office building)
• Parking Entrance/Exit (Underground & Outdoor)
• Lift/Staircases
• Reception/Waiting areas

3. In terms of safety protocols, there were four levels identified:

• Travel Safety
• Community Safety
• Individual Safety
• Business Safety

As a final roundup of the research phase, I went ahead and understood how organizations around the world were solving this scenario. If there were existing products in the market that could help create a baseline that we could use for benchmarking. Unfortunately, no solution that was in the same space except for a few news articles about confidential tie-ups with governments.

Ethical Practices for Contact Tracing

Avanade had a great article on their Insights blog which mentioned that COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic in this world so it was important for technology to step in and help curb the spread to set an example for future solutions along the same lines. The article here mentions points based on the Avanade Digital Ethics Framework which assessed the ethical implications of such technology (contact tracing). This assessment kept GDPR as a baseline and made additions on top of it. While in the research phase of a contact tracing application, it was vital that we kept in mind these points. Ethical practices such as Data collection, Data retention, Access to authoritative information, etc. were emphasized, just to name a few.

How does Contact Tracing work?

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Understand business requirements

As stated earlier, the foremost agenda from a business perspective was to remedy any client work roadblocks. This, in turn, would allow more revenue to flow in and put a stop to any possible lay-offs. In the several meetings we had with the organizational leadership, there was a clear consensus on our proposal as the larger picture made sense on both the business and the human level. The other key component of the requirement was to be the first to reach the market with such a product. This was an indication of the kind of timelines that were ahead of us.

Analyse

Drawing Insights

After the quick round of interviews and secondary research that I was able to do, the following were some of the insights that I'd gathered:

The reason for identifying the essential worker categories was to narrow down on the various user archetypes as well as the primary persona to interview. As per the findings, three personas were made that encapsulated the different ways this product could deviate:

1. Technical Support Staff - Primary
2. Security Staff - Secondary
3. Workforce Staff - Tertiary

Narrowing down to three personas did not mean it would be enough to cater to the wide range of users that could use the product but, it guarantees very minimal deviation in terms of features that could occur in the future.

The reason for identifying the physical areas where the app could be used puts the product usage in the context of its environment. What does this give us? It shows us that selected personas would only use the app in their designated work environment, meaning they would need only some set of features pertaining to their job. It also helps in identifying the color choices and setting the right UI since some of the personas were outdoor and, some were indoors.

Furthermore, the idea behind identifying the safety protocols was to understand the different components of the user journey where a standard operating procedure would be necessary. The following are some of the points I had managed to gather:

Different components of a user's journey

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Structure the unstructured

From thereon, we could draw a pretty good picture to derive a more defined persona and user journey map.

Note: There were other challenges such as the technological feasibility and back-end systems that played a role in the creation of the product. Due to the product pending release, I shall not be documenting any part of this.

Employee Journey Map

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Architecting the future

Looking at the different insights that we gathered, the next natural step was to create the Information Architecture. The points of consideration in creating the following were analysing the journey map created and mapping it with a bunch of features (and obviously keeping the ethical practices in mind).

Information Architecture for the Employee persona

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Design

Visual Design

For the design phase, our approach was simple (I say 'our' because the requirements had changed to what I had agreed to initially for the stipulated deadline due to which I requested a member of our UX Studio to help me with this stage. Thanks a bunch, Ishaan!). We were going to aim for the mobile viewport first as a large number of our users would be using this as a mobile application.
The second phase was going to be the desktop dashboard for the workforce team (super admins). Simply because there was a large amount of information that needed to be showcased in one screen, it made no sense to make a mobile version of this.
And the last phase would be tablets for the Security personnel but as resources are scarce when rolling out a project like this, we created the mobile version of the Security Personnel screens first.

Note: There were various other screens made for the Workforce and Management teams that cannot be showcased due to pending release.

Following are some of the screens:

Employee (Supervisor Persona) Mobile Screen

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Employee (Supervisor Persona) Mobile Screen

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Employee (Supervisor Persona) Tablet Monitoring screen

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Employee (Supervisor Persona) Desktop Dashboard

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Handoff & Outcome

Developer Handoff

As this project was ongoing as I exited the company, I did not get a chance to do a formal handoff as I have for earlier projects. Secondly, this project was being developed and built alongside the design phases to have faster validation with the stakeholders.

All screens and assets were directly managed through Figma's design system and asset management.

Reflections

Although a relatively short project as compared to any of my previous work within the organization, it was an absolute pleasure to work and deliver in such a high-pressure situation. Timelines were strictly adhered to as there was no scope of extensions.

I had a great opportunity to be able to work alongside a team of doctors, engineers, business leaders, as well as designers. Talking to my direct supervisor on the project - Dr. Arti Thapliyal - for hours daily, helped improve my empathy skills even further by giving me a unique perspective into the medicare/meditech sector. I was able to conduct a design thinking workshop for generating ideas through How Might We questions with the leadership of the organization. Such brainstorming sessions contributed vastly to the kind of outcome that came to fruition. One of the major hurdles

The project success is yet to be determined as it is pending release but I'm assured it is in safe hands and that the vision remains the same - To help essential office workers retain their jobs by safely transitioning them back to workplaces.