Personal Assistant
Help people live balanced lives by building a zero-to-one product that connects human assistants to members.
This startup, within Panasonic, came to us with a seed of an idea — to help people live fuller lives while offloading their delegate-able tasks to a human assistant. Throughout our engagement, with many twists and turns, we helped define the product offering for both MVP launch and future vision work.
My role: I wore many hats on this project. Each sprint required heavy UX work, systems thinking, as well as defining the experience’s visual design simultaneously. For each sprint, I would own specific features that often were complex, nebulous, and introduced brand-new paradigms. I would also collaborate with my teammates on our intertwined features.
In addition to the sprint work, I took the lead in defining the look and feel of this new product from the company’s early brand kit (logo & colors). Throughout the project, I also mentored the clients’ (awesome) junior designers and managed production designers.
Our 8-month engagement followed a typical product development and design process from start to finish. We onboarded around the same time the clients’ team was forming. Together, we discovered the business and target audiences’ needs, defined the MVP promise and investment, designed the primary experiences, and defined the product’s look/feel — ultimately delivering a product design that is helping people across the U.S. today.
In this phase, we investigated the users and business opportunities. We talked to people from the initial target audience to understand their day-to-day and self-identified pain points. We used these insights to map user journeys throughout common situations. Additionally, we initiated a light landscape analysis to push the business to think more creatively. There were many ideas of what this product could/should be and how to provide value. This phase helped solidify the product goal of the company.
After discovery, we began to bring the lofty product goal and new insights into reality. We created rough concept cards which included a rough visual and summary of the feature idea. These concept cards were used for additional user testing, and for stakeholder alignment conversations. We also detailed a service blueprint to map how the front and back of the house would come together to help the users’ journey.
In the design phase, we tackled each of the major experiences over two-week sprints. In addition to designing new UX paradigms, I lead the effort to define the brand throughout our product experience. Below are the main experiences I focused on.
Build the relationship
Offer control without overload
Earn trust overtime
Critical to establishing a trusting relationship between the member and the human assistant, Chat was an early and ongoing experience throughout the project. I designed chat widgets, connected conversations, search functionalities, and look/feel details.
After a member asks for help with a task (it could be virtually anything), the assistant would create a task item and start working on it. I focused on how to represent these tasks throughout their lifecycle. Additionally, I designed how the member could control, add, and organize tasks without feeling overwhelmed.
A major design challenge was to represent a task (a member request of any sort) in an interesting but sustainable/extendable way. We explored many iterations and ultimately landed on my direction — injecting color and personality through the use of organized and balanced task-related objects. I consulted on the art direction of the photoshoots and the definition of the photo style within the product.
When the assistant completed a task or was ready for additional input, they would create a “Proposal.” This proposal also needed to be as flexible as the potential task topic or individual situations. We defined what template content was a priority and flexible for the assistant, and designed it to ensure control and review without overwhelming either party.
This feature allowed the company to partner with other businesses and offer personalized life-enriching task suggestions to the member. We designed this experience to be more immersive and editorial than the more transactional experiences like the task/detail screens.
