Sideways 6

Sideways 6 helps their users to engage with all of their employees, enhance your organization, and foster a culture of innovation quickly and easily. They do this through platforms like Microsoft Teams and your Interact Intranet. The platform offers their users an area online to express themselves with their ideas that can reach upper management more easily to help influence changes in company process and culture.

  • It can be estimated that around only 30-45% of workers typically feel they have a significant impact on the business they work for. This has left a significant portion of the workforce feeling that they therefore do not have such a significant impact on business practises for the companies that they work for and that suggestions can easily go unheard.

    Sideways 6 has the goal to allow regular workers to express and share their ideas with their company for the betterment of their day to day at their place of work.

    The Sideways 6 Idea shareing platform allows their users to title, describe and attach supporting media to an idea that can be shared with the larger workforce through a wider campaign that is run. This then allows other users to engage in conversation and ask questions to help aid an idea flourish. The platform also allows managers to categories each ideas and organise them more strategically so that if action was to be taken on an idea it can be done so more efficiently.

    Sideways 6 has also, recently, introduced the use of Artificial Intelligence into their platform to allow it to be more accessible. The AI can find ideas that are already similar to theirs to avoid repetition or can be utilised to check over their idea and offer improvements so that they can hit all of the major campaign points.

  • When a user begins the process of putting their idea in writing rather than just being in their head we wanted to make the process as simple as possible.

    There are only 3 main segments to creating an idea, and not all of them are mandatory!

    - Give your idea a title

    - Describe the idea

    - Attach any accompanying media

    When a company runs a campaign they may be targeting a specific area of the business or be looking to attain more insight into a much wider problem so therefore the campaign managers can add additional questions to the idea generating process, But these have the option of being mandatory or not as well.

    When an employee creates their idea and enters over a specific character counts the AI kicks in.

    The AI will start looking for similar ideas that may already have been submitted to the campaign. This is a lot less likely during a fresh campaign but some campaigns have been know to run for over 12 months so sometimes repetition does become an issue.

    The AI has been implemented to negate the repetition by showing the user, as they are creating their idea, that similar ideas exist and they may want to alter theirs.

    The AI also congratulates users for thinking of a unique idea as well if nothing similar was already found within the campaign.

    There are two main aspects to the Sideways 6 AI

    - Similar Ideas

    - Improve with AI

  • As the senior product designers for the Microsoft teams application at Sideways 6 my contributions entailed

    • Evaluating the current application for changing user needs and requirements

    • Responsible for the evolution of the interface

    • Devised new features to enhance and facilitate easier idea shareing

    • Concept development for AB testing

    • Collated user feedback via MixPanel

    • Ideation workshops via Miro

    • Developing with a "Mobile-First" approach

    • Prototyping complex wireframes

    • Develop new user flows to solve existing pain points across the application

    • Design-to-Development handoff

  • Mobile usage has surpassed desktop in terms of web traffic. More people access the internet via mobile devices, so designing for mobile ensures a good experience for the majority of users. This was especially prevalent for Sideways 6 where a lot of employees were not desk based. Many employees that used the SW6 app were working on the shop floor or out in the field where we know that ideas can flourish the strongest.

    It was integral to the application to have a smooth mobile journey therefore the mobile first approach was used throughout the application (although some features were not included in mobile for more "Admin" style use where data and analytics was more optimised to be viewed on desktop.

  • AI has been a common feature that is being brought into most applications lately. The way in which is was incorporated into the SW6 platform was to help categorise the ideas that were being suggested into the application via the campaigns.

    It was a common pain point that many Account mangers would express that there would be multiple ideas that were very similar to one another.

    This pain point was addressed with the use of AI and the "Similar Ideas" feature.

    This feature would look for key words within the users submission and flag, to any user that was submitting, if their ideas was already suggested within the campaign.

    Oppertunities for the users to interact with previously submitted ideas were suggested by the AI therefore promoting a sense of comradery and team work within the campaign.

    When a user did submit a unique idea, our AI would also suggest how this idea can be improved. There can be instances where companies dealt with language barriers and/or an individual not being particularly articulate in their idea expression. The AI would suggest, but not enforce, ways in which the idea can be fleshed out therefore helping and empowering all employees to submit more ideas for the benefit of the company.

  • Design systems can be a tricky beast. More so when you are trying to emulate, but customise your own to fit pre existing branding (i.e. Microsoft teams)

    It was my responsibility to research and generate, where necessary, new features that resembled the MS teams look and feel.

    One of which was the "Feature Highlights" that we created when we were releasing a new product to market.

    You never want to just spring a new feature on your users without them understanding why or what it is for so we often released new features with a small feature highlight pop up that would simply inform the user of a new feature and, through testing, simple illustrations were created to help users understand these releases (In both light and dark mode as well as for both Mobile and Desktop).

  • There were many iterations of the SW6 AI bot. We originally wanted to have a more "flowy" chat bot, but due to technical constraints this was abandoned after researching the pros and cons of such an endeavour.

    After looking into how other bots had accomplished the flow of chat, as well as taking into account our specific needs, at the time, it was agreed that the bot should remain fairly simple for the time being. We were worried that it would remove a lot of the personal involvement of the users who were submitting their ideas and did not want to jeopardise the feeling of "contribution" that many users had experienced while using the SW6 application.

    You can see some of the pros and cons of the different types of chat bot flows that I collated as well as the over all final flow that was agreed upon.

  • Working at Sideways 6 really elevated my "handover" game. Structured Design to Dev hand over was created with Figma, tickets were generated and linked via Azure as well as your standard product/dev sprint meetings and retros.