AWP - Work from office
Designing work from office feature
Opportunity
As COVID cases began settling down and people started stepping out, a similar attitude was observed in Amazon employee feedback which stated how employees were keen on coming to work occasionally for face to face time with other employees and teammates for the purpose of collaboration and brainstorming. The traditional method of communication for employees was Slack and Amazon Chime (Amazon’s in house messaging application).
This was an opportunity for Amazon Workplace to help employees coordinate their work from office plans and organize group collaboration activities in office without relying on Slack and/or Amazon Chime and/or emails.
Defining objectives
The objectives while designing the Work from office feature include the following:
To optimize and streamline the communication process for creating an individual/group work from office booking
To reduce human error that happens in communicating via traditional communication channels where people might end up missing messages
To reduce communication time and gaps that are likely to occur when a group meet up in office is being organized.
Project planning
Work from office was the first feature upgrade project after Seat reservation feature had been launched. The goal was to design and launch the feature in the original AWP ecosystem given time constraints. I collaborated with the project manager and the engineering team to align on the approach which included breaking the project down into three epics:
Epic 1: Creating a (group) work from office request
Epic 2: Responding to a request received from the requestor
Epic 3: Finalizing the work from office plans based on the responses received from invitees
The epics were designed and delivered in an agile fashion where I met up with the PM, engineering and leadership team at each step to get their buy in in terms of the user flow and design aesthetic before the deliverable was finally handed off for development.
Design process
The first step was to break the epic down into smaller user stories that outlined the user flow which looked like this:
Coordinate: A requestor can send a group WFO proposal that includes:
A location for the group WFO
A short list of dates for consideration
A list of invited employees
Response: Invitees can review the details of the group WFO proposal, and respond with their preferences
Finalize: A requestor can choose from the original short-listed dates, and auto-create a WFO booking for themselves and the invitees who responded as being available on that date
EPIC 1: Create & send request
Selecting WFO location
Selecting invitees (if group invite) or proceeding without additional invitees (individual work from office plan)
Selecting a list of potential WFO dates up to 12 weeks into the future
Creating WFO plan if single attendee. If multiple invitees then creating & sending request to them and waiting for their response
Providing additional details about the WFO plan
EPIC 2: Invited employees respond to WFO request
Invited employees receive and view the request
They can either accept all proposed dates, decline all proposed dates, select a subset of proposed dates or select “any date” as their response
Invited employees can view the full list of invited employees along with their responses to the request
Invited employees can cancel attendance of a previously accepted request
Invited employees can join WFO group of a finalized group WFO plan - happens if the invited employee opens an invite after the requestor has already finalized the group WFO plan
EPIC 3: Finalize group WFO plan
Review responses received from invitees
Confirm or cancel group WFO request
Implementation & collaboration
At every step of the design process, it was ensured that all the stakeholders (project manager, engineering team and leadership team) were aligned in terms of the strategic evolution of a simple seat reservation feature into a more elaborate and seamless way of making a work from office booking, either group or individual. Some of the steps taken to achieve this alignment included:
Weekly touch points with project manager to share progress
Continuous involvement of engineering team right from the start to ensure timely execution and delivery of the proposed design
Organizing design walkthroughs at the end of each epic design delivery before hand off
Overall, the designs that are showcased are a result of multiple iterations based on constant feedback loop that involved the aforementioned parties thereby ensuring that once launched the users will have a seamless experience using this feature.
Project timeline
The epics were delivered in a 2 week sprint making the overall project timeline from design perspective, a 6 week long undertaking. This testing was done post design hand off to engineering team in parallel with development.
Constraints
One of the biggest constraints I was working with as part of this project was the timeline.
When this feature was added to the roadmap, it came as a combination of sudden request based on the feedback that the leadership team had been getting over time regarding being able to work from office occasionally. Another player driving this feature was the original seat reservation feature that was isolated and didn’t allow any type of communication/collaboration amongst teammates.
As a result, when the proposal for work from office came in, the launch date had been set even before the design started and so I had 6 weeks to go from zero to high fidelity designs ready for delivery. The agile approach helped in ensuring the engineering team wasn’t sitting idle as 2 weeks into the project, they had the designs of the first epic ready for development.
Impact
The launch of group WFO feature brought about a 47% increase in adoption of Amazon workplace. The user feedback regarding the experience of the product was positive thereby allowing the leadership team to take a strategic decision to deprecate the original seat reservation feature and replace it completely by Work from office feature.
SPIN OFF FEATURE REQUEST: Slack app integration
One of the feedback that was received was introducing a Slack extension of Work from office app thereby making it easier for employees to get notifications if any of their teammates have WFO plans or have sent a group WFO request. This extension was quickly designed and launched in a total of 2 sprints.
