Iris Worldwide
London — July 2018 to December 2020
I worked with many clients including the following:Samsung
•
Amazon
•
KFC
•
Wacom
•
WAPP Insurance
•
Samsung • Amazon • KFC • Wacom • WAPP Insurance •
My main projects and takeaways from my time at Iris
I have learnt so much at Iris and will be forever grateful to have started my London journey there. I was able to work with incredible clients and interacted with super talented and driven people.
I will show you my favourite work below: Samsung Backstage
What is Samsung Backstage?
Backstage is a learning platform for both a web and a mobile and it is designed to help Samsung retail people learn and sell Samsung products within stores. It helps understand what the products are about, what the USPs are, test themselves on what they learned thanks to bite sized content and quizzes. It also allow them to compete with other team members and earn points while learning.
All designs and art direction are made by Blanca Hong.
My role on the project
I created the personas out of the research that was done in the previous month. And I was the only person in charge of all of the wireframes for the project, across all user types, and devices. I was the point of reference for the Designer and for the Tech Team to build the app and web apps.
The project and the team in numbers
The other 2 UX designers are: Rita the Researcher and Alex the Lead who was my manager overseeing the project especially towards the beginning. I was the only one responsible for the final UX on the product and I was also presenting my work every week to Senior Samsung Stakeholders.
A typical day during the delivery phase
The discovery phase
Requirement: 3 different types of users.
-
FSM
The Early Adopters
The wider group of users, retail shop staff, who will have to learn about the Samsung products to sell them to their customers
— Restricted access to some content
— Dedicated profile items
— Leaderboard -
Elite
The Brand Ambassadors
The selected users who will evangelise both the FSMs and the customers. They have precise tasks to complete to keep this premium rank.
— Dedicated forum section
— Exclusive news content
— 1 to 1 messaging -
ADM
The Teachers
ADMs will go in shops to teach the Elite and FSM people, check their progress in the Backstage learning and keep them motivated.
— Messaging
— Ability to award badges
— Specific rights and accesses
I created a Trello board to manage our workload with the UI Designer. A lot of the project management was being done in docs and spreadsheets, and I found it tricky to have an efficient way of working and tracking our progress. Especially since we were working slightly in an asynchronous way: UX was happening 1 week before UI. So we had to be fully aware of how far the other designer was in order to be aligned and not block each other.
High fidelity wireframes for mobile
High fidelity wireframes for desktop
This is how we ended up creating all the screens for this new platform for each category and piece of content needed for the tech team to quote and plan everything. We had meetings with the tech leads every day to share our progress and check what was feasible and what was not.
We also had 2 weekly WIP meetings with the client so they could follow every step of our work and tell us what was on the right track or what needed improvement. Every morning we also had a stand-up meeting with the whole team to check what was done the previous day, what was the tasks for the day and if there were any blockers.
We did have a lot of meetings for this project but we had only 7-8 weeks to produce all the wireframes before it moved to the build phase, so it was crucial that we kept communicating as much as possible.
Read and see more of the design in the customer story on the Totara website, which is the LMS we used to build Samsung Backstage.
I improved on
I think the biggest learning from this project was that I am able to manage a project on my own (for this specific phase) and also work as a team efficiently with as much communication as possible.
Lessons learnt
As efficient as the team was, I think we were missing a Business Analyst to log every single decision made because we realised during build that some areas weren't clear enough for the devs and few of them had to go through a lot of back and forth several times on the same functionality.
However I am now working on another LMS platform for Amazon, which is the perfect occasion for me to apply everything I learnt during Backstage and create another interface that could solve the same kind of problem as Backstage > help retail staff to learn about products in a simple and playful way.
I also want to show you 2 more projects I worked on while being at Iris
WAPP
Wapp is a traveling insurance app that I worked on for over 6 months. That was a zero to 1 project as it was a brand new product that our client Ryan Howsam wanted to launch.
I was in charge of the whole UX pairing with designers on the UI. I was presenting the progress of my work directly to the client on a regular basis.
KFC 1010
This project started as the 1st ever hackathon organised by our client KFC in December 2018. Since I was part of the team who won, we were then asked to build the MVP for our app in January 2019, which was done in house in their Woking office. I was in charge of the full UX pairing with the UI designer Diego as well as 2 other developers.