✦ a work in progress
Opslock
The new way companies stay safe.
Helping to prevent accidents in the workplace by predicting hazards and and helping employees understand how to reduce risk before they encounter it.
Timeframe October 2020 — August 2021
Tools Figma, Miro, Loom, Clubhouse, Notion
Role Product designer
Team Senior Product Designer, Engineering team, CEO & CTO
Designing for everyday impact and industry change
As the co-owner implementing design with another designer in the early stage startup then transitioning to the single head of product design, i've collaborated with the team to build the product from the ground up pushing for design thinking and users. As a novel product in the market, it's an interesting opportunity as we're building and directly impacting the direction of a meaningful product that calculates risk in real time with AI that ultimately helps save lives.
Opslock is fully cross platform app working on web, iOS and Android.
"Some 2.3 million women and men around the world succumb to work-related accidents or diseases every year." — International Labour Organization
Feature development process
The feature development process was developed and altered while I took on more ownership and direction of the projects, however it focuses on the stages of discover/define, development, validation and review. This process is flexible as features vary from broadly defined, loose concepts, to very defined, "service/fix" implementations.
Features to be considered come in through many channels with Canny for user requests, fixes needed, features from the "legacy" original website, ideas from internal stakeholders, or personal insight into user needs and view in the product.
Discover/ Define
- Initial phase of research, ideation and whiteboarding
- Explore issues, flows, and the ways users use the website and app
- Determining requirements, identifying opportunities, information architecture, edge cases, etc.
Development (iterative)
- Design flows and experiences within the existing visual system, adding to the design system as needed, and continuing UX patterns
- Craft interactive design prototypes for feedback and critique
Validation
- Validation with stakeholders and team members across departments
- Can be done via a collaborative design jam session, presenting to clients, or walkthrough with the appropriate stakeholders
Review
- Product review of the code with our Product manager, QA lead and responsible engineers to be pushed live for our users
Key questions
- What value does this feature bring to our customers?
- What is the primary path or happy path flow for a user?
- What would be the MVP of this feature, versus the following updates to the ideal final feature?
Requirements
- Ease of use — our primary customers are likely less familiar with technology as the current procedures are all done with paper and pen, and using the product out of necessity as a front-liner working in the industrial industries
- Simplify — what is the most straightforward and effortless way we can craft an experience
- Transparency — our customers are experts in their field, they want to know what is happening and clarity on the steps they're taking
Developing the design culture
I joined our Senior designer to contribute actively to building our design-driven development culture by facilitating meetings and whiteboard sessions. In addition, I was able to put in place other ideas and structures to improve our process. The main points I focused on were organization, collaboration and communication.
Design jams
Bringing together cross department team members, I ran our first collaborative reviewing activity. Although we had collaboration in place for the beginning of our feature designs (such as getting opinions from the Customer experience team on what the Support feature would help customers, or the Engineering team on the technical limits for recurring tasks), the final version wasn't seen by most of the team outside of the stakeholders, Product team and Engineering team.
Therefore adding a point for collaboration and participation of to validate new features or flows, having multiple points of view to help deliver a better everyday experience to our customers. As a designer, I facilitated these sessions going through the flows, allotting time to think about "what works", "what doesn't" and "questions and notes" then reviewing and addressing or build solutions together.
Design organization and sprints
When joining I found that other teams would sometimes have trouble finding the information they needed in the design files and various points of documentation. effectively leading to more time for them to scramble through items and time needed for Design to explain. I decided that centralizing all the information within a project was needed.
Integration into engineering
While we included feedback and validation from the responsible engineers for a feature (as pictured below), as a developing company we grew to two units of engineering teams and I became the voice of design and users integrated in the groups. This included being present in daily engineering standups to provide support and updates from the design team, an addition to grooming sessions, sprint planning sessions and sprint retros. As an addition to provide visibility to the design progress before implementation by engineering, I also started presenting the upcoming features in full company sprint demos.
With 123,982 hazards identified, 564,345 hours worked and 154,229 tasks performed
With helping companies streamline their operations, increasing efficiency and safety — we have new customers and companies integrate Opslock in their workflows and make a change in the standard of safety in the industrial industries and their everyday lives.