Teammate provides frontline workers easy access to the information they need to stay safe, productive, and engaged. From one app, employees can manage shifts, track tasks, follow corporate communications and social media, or connect easily with HR, IT, or facilities.
UX Design Lead
Internal Avanade and Microsoft Partnership
June 2020 (16 months) | Remote
Avanade's Modern Workplace Lead, Marc Wilkinson, spearheaded Avanade's first non-consulting product creation project for a mobile-first workplace application called Teammate. At the time, COVID-19 was in full effect, and clients were asking for a way to keep their first-line workers safe but still connected. Avanade partnered with Microsoft to build the application via its Teams platform.
Gather and sync all the siloed and independently created application mock-ups into one application design and match it up to the true capabilities of Teams for the development of the application that fulfills the needs of frontline workers and supervisors.
Within the North American region, there were numerous starts in creating a front-line worker tool. My team and I found, organized, and reviewed the research and product mock-ups. We looked for commonalities and watched for unique insights.
We determined nine initial vital areas from our product reviews, client discussions, and brainstorming sessions.
Since this project was set to work within the Microsoft Teams platform, my team and I met with the Microsoft Teams team and our internal Teams specialists to understand the Teams platform.
Now that we understood Teams, it was time to determine our strategy for Teammate that would meet the user's needs.
I discussed with my designers how we needed to create flexibility within the design, allow for future company branding, and ensure that visual accessibility would not be lost. You can see how we brought everything together in the video to the below.
As Teammate prepared for release, we felt creating a real-life scenario to present to potential clients would help them relate to and understand Teammate's capabilities.
In the presentation of the user scenario, we demonstrated our prototypes as both the art of the possible and developing the analysis for front-line worker needs. This allowed us to collaborate with industry leaders to refine the product/roadmap concepts. The learnings are still being adopted and consumed by various parties: Microsoft, Avanade, and Accenture.
Below you will see a portion of one of the prototypes I created.
As the development team began building the front-line worker experience, my XD team and I came together, utilizing the same process as before, to determine and create the supervisor experience.
After everything was said and done, Avanade now had its first fully designed web application available to sell to clients as a modern workplace experience tool. Working closely with the sales team, I assisted with presentations and discussed future possibilities. From this project, Avanade continues to partner with Microsoft to develop many modern workplace experiences.
“When I kicked off a skunkworks project to deliver a compelling experience to frontline workers, Raphaela was the obvious choice for the team, bringing immense skill and proficiency in designing (and articulating) a captivating user experience – a way of working – that resonated with the actual frontline workers – addressing many of the things that are wrong with the current approaches. As a skunkworks project, it was more of a build-the-rocket ship as you leave the launch pad with your tail on fire. Rather than rebelling against the ambiguity, Raphaela embraced it, understanding the opportunity to help others. She coached many of the other members who were less comfortable with the uncertainty and lack of minute detail of the design, reinforcing the goals and intent of the project. She quickly became one of the leads on the project, guiding the development team as well as the client side teams on their approach to customers, supporting many of those conversations directly."
Marc Wilkinson
Executive | Modern Workplace Lead - West
Avanade | Teammate
