Problem Statement
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Since going remote, Ford teams had a hard time capturing unbiased story sizes, brainstorm ideas, and ice breaker questions without agreeing with the loudest voice in the room. This presented an opportunity to develop a topic editable tool to capture user's vote without being influenced by the vote of their colleagues.
Project Goals
Minimize group think and leadership bias by hiding votes until all votes have been submitted
Encourages the sharing of a diversity of perspectives
Support different meeting formats like story pointing, ice breakers, voting, and brainstorming
Increase collaboration and build better team relationships remotely
Research Methods
Journey Mapping
Client Interviews
Persona Development
Prototyping
Current State
Hackathon Project Reseach
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Our team picked up the working MVP to begin getting user feedback on from Ford teams and work on the following epics.
Early Research
Tool Potential
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While StoryJam was made to be a story-pointing tool, the flexibility of the open editing fields lended to more collaborative meeting potential.
IT Teams
Our target audience was using the tool as expected. They were also using it as a candid way to run their end of sprint retros. Both facilitators and non-facilitators were using the input field to get more actionable feedback from their teams by focusing the team on one question at a time.
Brainstorming Teams
Since any user could Edit Topic field, we found multiple team members input question they needed answered from the group. This behavior leads to more organic brainstorms and some even ran their team retros with the tool.
Ice Breaker
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When introduced to facilitators, they quickly used the tool to create icebreaker questions for their meetings. Those that participated loved how playful and non-corporate the tool was. Facilitators stated that the tool lead to more diverse voices and conversations than before.
When discovering these new behaviors, we mapped out ways that voters and non-voters could use the tool differently and more efficiently. We then tested these features with a new set of Ford employees to keep the conversation topics going and keep the voting even more unbiased.
Feature Development
Utility Bar
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With more user desired room functionality, we housed these controls in one place away from the voting actions.
This included:
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Showing/hiding votes to easily reveal the user's answers
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Clearing the votes to quickly start the next vote.
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Shuffling avatars to mix up the order of voter responses.
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Ending the session to clear the entire room for the next meeting.
Voting and Non-Voting
Users facilitating users expressed they would not be participating in the meeting responses, rather they would be changing the topic and recording the responses. This lead to us workshopping a voting and non-voting mode. The leanest approach was disabling the voting functionality for the facilitator. This way the votes were not held up by the facilitators response.
Removing Avatars
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There was a way to clear rooms, but not ways to clear individuals from a room if they were no longer needed in the discussion and/or if they had to step away. We designed a small close icon under each one of the avatars so anyone could remove a team member from the room to continue voting.
While working through our final goals capturing the responses more seamlessly for facilitators and the possibility of EVEN MORE fruit, we worked on a marketing plan to more user feedback.
Marketing
Internal Launch
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After 90-days, the team agreed we wanted to do a soft launch of StoryJam to Ford to gain feedback in Mouseflow on how teams were using it without our facilitation. We launched a blog article to our Ford internal Blog and created a campaign of promo posts across IT various groups in Ford to highlight the value StoryJam can brings to their teams.
FordLabs Blog Post​
We started locally by targeting all our Ford internal followers by creating a blog post. We reached 1131 views in the first week.
Internal Social Posts
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We also identifed 12 different teams across Ford's internal social to advertise to. The social posts highlighted the specific benefits StoryJam offers to the respective group, emphasizing collaboration, efficiency, and improved project outcomes to encourage adoption among Ford employees.
StoryJam continues to be preferred way in which teams in Ford collaborate remotely. Since internally marketing and demoing with friends and family, StoryJam was recorded being used across multiple countries.
Solution
By leveraging the energy and support of our hackathon, we were able to quickly develop and deploy a solution that addressed the unique challenges of remote collaboration. The product showcased FordLabs' methodology of user-centric design, simplicity, integration, scalability, security, and iterative improvement in creating a product that would reduce numerous meetings and create new ideas faster for Ford where everyone has a say.
Desktop - Home
Desktop - Profile Page
Desktop - Voting Page
Learnings
I personally learned how quickly a team can move when you have full autonomy of a product and support from a small team of product managers, two designers, and rotating software engineers. Working with a balanced team brought diverse perspectives and occasional struggles in aligning the product's direction, but ultimately, it underscored the importance of keeping the tool flexible to accommodate the varied ways users wanted to utilize it. If there was more development time, I would have implemented a mobile version, a way to download the results from the voting sessions and added more fruit avatars.