Sideways 6

Sideways 6 is an ideas management platform that allows its users to engage with all of their employees and foster a culture of innovation quickly and easily. We can empower them to share their ideas with management to better their company from the ground level.

  • 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.

    Combine this with an ideas board that can have repeated ideas with no context and, sometimes, titles that don’t immediately convey the full idea and it can be a bit of problem.

    The proposed solution was to utilise an AI. 

This AI would be able to suggest additional content that the user could add to flesh out their idea as well as identify if an idea has already been submitted to the campaign.

  • The process of writting an idea was clunky. It was split over two pages, content wouldn’t save when you went ‘back’ and sometimes some user wouldn’t be aware of what questions were mandatory or not. 

Below is a snapshot of what the UI used to look like.

  • Though looking into different types of bots out there we knew we wanted to make the experience as easy as possible. 



    By expecting the user to type out more information for the bot, after already having typed out their idea, we were aware that this was a major drop off for users. 



    From our information we knew that a lot of our users would write their ideas on the bus, on their breaks, in their spare time. Basically when ideas came to them in their “thinking zone” 

With this in mind, we looked at the two following bot types.

  • There are a lot of moving parts behind the scenes for the bot. To keep it simple and keep the user engaged in the flow. Below is the first attempt at taking into account everything that would need to happen

  • I’m an advocate for a lot of detail! but I’m also well aware that it can confuse people quite quickly. So it’s always a good idea to refine, refine and refine again!

    In presentations or, to sell the idea to colleagues, if I can break the problem down into it’s simplest form and get people to understand that then I can add detail back in at a later date.

  • It’s worth pointing out here that SW6 had 2 designers. The SW6 product is made up of two parts. A backend used by high end users to manage the campaigns and the Microsoft Teams application used by their wider teams. 

I was responsible for the whole of the MS Teams application. So with this in mind what I had to keep in mind for this new feature was

    - Evaluating the current application for changing user needs and requirements
    - Do we already have assets we can utilise?
    - When I make new assets can I mimic the Teams style?
    - Do my explanations in Miro make sense for presenting my findings?
    - Develop with a mobile first approach
    - Prototyping complex wireframes can aid in internal understanding
    - What am I learning?

  • Here is a snapshot of the mobile iterations what were created. We knew we wanted people to use the AI coach function to help them but the toss up was where in the flow to put it? What colours and how poignant?

  • In a product where we were trying to make people feel comfortable with shareing their ideas, helping them to express themselves I dug deeper into how this could be done. This is when I decided to add a face to our AI, To humanise it and to make it seem a lot less … scary. We weren’t here to totally take over your idea but the thought process behind this was to give the user a companion to help them on their journey.

    It was received well! With users reporting back that they loved the “fun little robot”

  • Going back to the 2 types of AI, “Conversational” and “Single Response”, it was decided that a single response type of AI would be the least demanding on the team for the beta iteration. This is mainly due to the time it would take for the AI to process the user inputs, to obtain a response and to then display this response to the user.

    Here is an examples of the prototypes of the more conversational type of AI I was imagining.

  • 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).

  • Well we thought of that! One of the largest pieces of feedback we received from campaign mangers was that sifting through the ideas that were being submitted, especially at the start of a campaign launch, was tedious as a lot of their employees would submit the same thing.

    This is why we also had our AI do this work for them. Not only would it catch ‘Similar ideas’ but it would also suggest alternatives along the same line.

    But it would also congratulate users for a unique idea! Something I really wanted to include as I felt, being able to create something unique for your company was an accomplishment worth celebrating.

    We had different states that would show depending on the outcome of the user submitting their idea. these were,

    • Suggested Improvements

    • Similar ideas found

    • Congratulated (for unique idea)

  • Taking into account everything above I was able to revamp the main ideas submission page.

    It takes into account the additional benefits that the AI was able to offer the users, while not forcing it down their throat as some users still like to do as much as possible on their own.

    It also got rid of the arduous two page idea submission process that plagued a lot of users.

    And as such we noticed a distinct rise in the number of ideas being submitted.

  • Marks and Spencers have been using the Sideways 6 platform for a campaign titled “Straight to Stuart” this campaign is run with 65,000 employees and last year reported that they had generated 10,000 unique ideas.

    There was an influx in idea generation when the Sideways 6 Idea AI improvements were implemented and feedback informed us that the quality of ideas had improved dramatically.

    But not only that, the ideas that were coming in, now with a ‘Similar idea filter’ were a lot more unique and they were uncovering problems and suggestions for their business faster than ever!

  • Well… this!

    The culmination of the teams hard work, the research, the iterations we produced the failures we encountered all led to these screens.

    This is where we mapped flow, button states, what if scenarios and additional components we could add to our growing design system.