Creating a more humane project management tool by focusing on first principles and collaboration in physical spaces
Remote tooling has never been better, however we are also keenly aware that it doesn’t replace every aspect of being in the same space. With Recoder we worked the consultancy Coeraj to explore this opportunity.
Design Lead (Me)
100%
Design Director
20%
Principal Designer
100%
Product Designer
100%
Product Delivery Manager
50%
Adding structure to an open ended goal
We had a remarkably open ended goal: to make a digital collaboration tool that restored some of what was missing from in-person collaboration.
Our clients specialized in change management consulting, but had done most of their work in large sessions of 50-100 participants, all in physical spaces. They had a unique experience that wasn’t translating to being remote, despite tools like Zoom and Miro.
Through workshops that included competitive research, generative sketching, and various mapping exercises, we refined directions to explore.
Outputs
Competitive research
Workshops
Generative ideation
Reckoning with the value of space, context, and time. Philosophical discussions that lead to tangible decisions and product strategy.
Digital spaces can be flawed, despite their benefits
The physical world has clear limitations. One can only put up so many sticky notes on a wall before they’re out of space. Digital tools relieve us of that, promising infinite canvases. We know what is gained, but what is lost?
The benefit seems so enticing that we don’t even think about what we’re losing by accepting this trade-off.
Yet some of us persist in using a limited page to sketch and write rather than infinite canvas. Infinite scale ends up dissolving a sense of scale. Size and context vanish, and ability to frame and contextualize is weakened.
When do we need to be reminded of how far we’ve come?
We have complicated relationships to our sense of time. “Living in the past”, “trying to live in the present”, and “worrying about the future” are all statements that carry meaning for us. But when it comes to a lot of modern tooling, it’s all relatively simple.
“Here’s what you do today.”
But in some of our lowest moments, when we’re fixated on our current problems, people close to us will remind us of the past. How far we’ve come. The larger context of what we’re doing so we can remember the big picture. The past matters, even as we act within the present.
Our research showed no other products taking the point of view. Modern tools keep us focused on our tasks to a fault. Focus and isolation. How might we better represent the bigger picture for entire groups working together?
Bringing it all together in a core concept
These were parts of discussions, ideation, research, and generative work in the first few week of this project. Abstract, heady, but altogether fascinating discussions with clients that wanted to explore these ideas.
Fortunately this came together in core concept, that despite being raw, had potential to evolve.
What if we visualized a project as a singular, shared, scaled structure? One where you could be zoomed out for the literal high level view, and zoom in to reveal tasks on a daily basis? Could this provide accessible context?
Outputs
Mid-fidelity design explorations
Origami Studio prototype
Evolving the idea from distance to scale
While the initial ideas emulated digital maps with some inherent scale, by using “pins” for events they still lacked substance.
Prototype experimentation showed us that a distinct zoom didn’t feel inherently valuable. The byproduct of that is that each zoom level didn’t need to share the same structure if we didn’t transition between them like this.
What’s the right structure for each level of detail? At a whole Project, a week, or a day?
We moved towards a card pattern that shifted scale, creating a stronger sense of substance for the visualization of work and time. Cards that felt like containers, so that zooming in effectively let us inside that volume.
Outputs
Detailed user flow
High fidelity designs
Figma prototype
Cutting a major feature as a win (or how a culture of safety and adaptability is better than any plan)
With about 3 weeks to in design we all felt good about the overall concept and execution. Our clients were on board and looking forward to starting development.
However there was one element that was proving difficult. In our earlier discussions, we had brought up units of time and their meaning. Specifically months and weeks.
“I met up with them last month” or “we accomplished that last month” are reasonable statements. So are “our focus this week is [x]”, or “we’ll deal with that next week”.
Units of time are conceptual tools for people and we wanted to respect and leverage these ideas. We had parts the UI using both months and weeks as structural elements within a project. Both were enclosed in a higher level structure: projects were made of several phases, which were several weeks (or months) long.
However, we continued to stumble on months. Months start or end on any day. They have variable length. If a project started on the last day of a month, then summaries for each month would look imbalanced due to major differences of scale (1 day vs 31).
What we thought earlier was supplanted by what we knew later on.
As any project moves forward, you learn more. You know the least at the start (when planning occurs). I reminded our team of that, and we decided to pitch removing the concept of months, which cleaned up some views and eliminated whole other views as well.
While we were nervous about the response, given we had argued for this idea in the first place, our proposal went by without a hitch. The clients agreed, we removed it, and the project was far more focused.
Outputs
Web designs
Figma prototypes
Outcome
This was the foundation of this product that is still undergoing work in subsequent phases. With the rise in LLMs and other AI technology, the client is exploring ways to leverage semantic data analysis to present better content within this framework.
The current value and outcome so far is in the process, an often overlooked point of view in case studies. We’re proud of the creative problem solving we did along with our client, and hope to see this product in the wild one day.