In today’s meeting we discussed some layout / wireframe ideas that had been drafted up as an individual work assignment. Here is an example of one of our working sketches:
New ideas that were well received in this design were:
- Account representative presence. We hoped to tie in ShoreTel presence with the widget to communicate easily to our customers if their rep is at Laddawn and taking calls. This actually spawned a lengthy discussion about managed accounts and house accounts and how the Experience would (or wouldn’t) be different depending on your relationship with a Laddawn account exec. We also discussed how much of a focus we want to put on the account reps when someone logs into the website, and if a “revolving door” of account reps and new faces on the main page might impact a customer.
- In this mockup we have a different take on filtering content within the Experience. Previously we had envisioned a tabbed view. Individual “conversations” or “segments” would be identified by icons appropriate to the subject matter (i.e. a bird for twitter, Laddawn logo for company announcements, etc.). Above we have a representation of colored buttons (or perhaps embossed icons) that would filter their corresponding segments. In this layout we would use subtle colors to differentiate between the segments. One benefit here is the additional real estate we would gain by not having to provide an icon.
- Navigation buttons at the bottom of the widget would pan through some X number of segments, with advance, rewind, and home options. This is different from the “Twitter style” layout we considered previously. This keeps the size of the widget fixed.
Fun
Moving on from the design discussion we talked for a while about fun. Specifically we looked for engaging and fun content that could enhance the “stickiness” of the widget and thereby the site overall. A short list of the most fun and engaging content we’re familiar with on the website includes:
- Social / discussion / ego fulfillment
- Videos / media / learning
- Games
This discussion propelled us into defining a brief list of Laddawn related games we could integrate into The Experience. These games would integrate with a reward system and also provide Laddawn with a valuable training tool for our customers. As we continued discussion we estimated this would be appropriate for a Phase 2 or later rollout and tabled the discussion for now.
Walls and Buckets
As we concluded our discussion on games we found ourselves on the topic of the wall itself. We acknowledged it was time to start making some assumptions about how we walled out the garden. Our first assumption is that Org # might make a natural barrier for our garden. Digging deeper we began to think about The Experience through the eyes of different types of users. First we talked an example Senior Sales Rep:
Ezra can send a message to …
- All his customers (going on vacation)
- An entire organization (Good news XpedX – Laddawn has become a Tier1 supplier)
- A specific location (Announcement for Atlanta manufacturing to XpedX Burmingham)
- A specific individual or group of individuals (similar to an email, Sharing relevant media content after a meeting to a group of attendees).
Initially this seemed simple, however as we considered a simple customer view of The Experience we quickly found ourselves more ground than we were making. Here is an example of what we were trying to tackle, a seemingly simple charting of what a sales rep can share based off preconfigured or user configured permissions:
It quickly became obvious we might be heading down the wrong path. Looking at this grid made us want to puke, so we backed off and agreed to reevaluate this model when were fresh at our next meeting. Additionally within the conversation we decided we should tackle the bucketing of different segments for easy filtering. This is something else we have discussed in previous meetings and have largely been making assumptions on but have not yet put to paper.
Finally we agreed that it might be helpful to include some basic email integration into The Experience by giving it an email address for internal use (experience@laddawn.com).
Conversation points for next meeting:
- Let’s the walling of our garden, specifically with a focus on a Phase 1 rollout.
- Let’s settle on bucketing for the content we want to include in the experience.
- Let’s finalize what we’d like to implement for Phase 1.
