AppXpress - Gordias - Burst Employee Collaboration Design Concepts Challenge

Welcome to AppXpress – Gordias - Burst Employee Collaboration Design Concepts Challenge!

This challenge is focused on creating design concepts/visual ideas to create an application for Gordias to give employees in an enterprise a strong voice in shaping the future of the company and solving big problems.

Round 1

Submit your design for a Checkpoint feedback:
1. Your initial design concept for Goals for a new iteration section.
- If you have time - please provide us with a click map for your design.
- Readme.jpg : Provide notes about your submission.
- Make sure all pages have correct flow! Use correct file numbering. (00, 01, 02, 03).

Round 2

Final Design plus any Checkpoint feedback:
1. Your final design concept for Goals for a new iteration section._­
- If you have time - please provide us with a click map for your design.
- Readme.jpg : Provide notes about your submission.
- Make sure all pages have correct flow! Use correct file numbering. (00, 01, 02, 03).

Challenge Description:
The goal of this challenge is to provide a Micro-social Crowdsolving platform utilizing 'burst' (3 day) collaboration to give employees in an enterprise a strong voice in shaping the future of the company and solving big problems.

Note: Gordias is a code name.

We are looking for the [topcoder] design Community to help us with planning our new "user experience" (UX).

Screen Sizes:
- Mobile Resolution: Design for iPhone 6 Retina Display 750px x 1334px.
- Desktop: Width of 1280px and height as required.
Make sure you create graphic in 'shape' format, so when we resize graphics will still look sharp! It will be great if you can provide the landscape version. 

Design Considerations and Goals:
- Your design needs to be responsive; please consider that while designing the pages.
- Focus on the user experience of each page and make sure each page has a complete flow.
- Give importance to the overall layout and think about how a user would interact with the content on the page.
- Show all the screens and provide a user flow/click-path, so we can see how the interactions fit together in the application.

Main Features:
1. Ask a question to the crowd, the question can be textual, or presented in a video 30s or less video.
2. Users join a session by invitation.
3. Sessions run for 1-3 days.
4. Sessions can be anonymous.
5. Users post a response (normally an idea/solution/suggestion) which is seen by everyone.
6. Users vote up (or down) and comment on the responses.
7. Users can view the ideas based on popularity, most recently entered, etc.
8. Users may be part of many sessions, some may be ongoing, some not yet started, some finished.
9. This is a Responsive web app - it is used on Desktop, Tablets, and Mobiles.

 User Flow:
1. A Vice President poses a big important problem he wants employees to solve, such as “How can we work more collaboratively across all of our locations?”  
2. In a matter of 2 days, the employees share ideas, and vote and comment on each others’ ideas.
3. The top ideas bubble to the top and then after the session, actions occur.

Gordias is different from most apps because there is context setting that is critical for a user to understand in order to be able to participate and gain a lot from the experience.   

The employee needs to understand:

1. What is the business problem the executive is concerned about?
2. Why is it important and compelling?   How does it relate to me?
3. What role do I have in helping solve this problem?  Why do I have knowledge that can help?
4. What specifically do I need to provide feedback on?

Today, this information is conveyed through a brief email that is sent out by the executive in the form of an Invitation email (with a link to Gordias) and a one minute custom video created by Gordias, canned video created by Gordias, or selfie video created by the executive, that auto-launches/auto-plays when the user first enters the app.

Goals for a new iteration (This Challenge Focus):   

1. Incredibly intuitive – the user won’t be going through any training or guidance with us.   We don’t have any sessions with our users to teach them.  
2. Modern. 
3. Social and intimate, you’re having a conversation with your colleagues. 
4. Clean, crisp, simple.  
5. Fun and light.  
6. A stronger consumer than enterprise feel, but needs to play well in enterprise.  
7. Super functional but also beautiful.  

You’re welcome to completely scrap everything we’ve done to this point (can be found in the below section) and approach this challenge in an entirely new way. You can also approach the entire product differently and not just limit this to a new UI design.

Gordias – what we’ve learned from users in the last 12 months:
Our Gordias Web app is in its 3^rd iteration of design over the last 12 months since inception.    Here’s a summary of what we have learned from users along the way.

Iteration #1 –All Ideas Page:

What users liked about Iteration #1:

1. Easy to figure out how to use the app.   Didn’t struggle with how to interact with features, actions, etc.
2. Easy to read all of the ideas.
3. Voting and commenting is fast.

What users disliked about Iteration #1:

1. Not energizing --- brainstorming and sharing ideas should be energizing
2. Very “corporate” and boring and plain.  Would prefer something more like Facebook or other social experiences.
3. Not modern.   Doesn’t look like an app that has been developed in the last 3 years.
4. All of the Nav choices are unneccesary and add clutter.  Not sure what they all mean.

Iteration #2:
All Ideas page:

Idea Detail Modal

Auto-Launch Intro Video

Experience Summary:  First time users go through a Welcome page which conveys that colleagues have been sharing ideas and they’ll be seeing ideas represented as cards.   Every user will always view a 1 minute video which auto-launches and plays and describes why the Challenge is important and the type of feedback needed.  First time users also go through a short tutorial which conveys the Idea cards and the fact that they are clickable (becomes a ½ screen modal with detail), plus how to add an idea.

What users liked about Iteration #2:

1. More exciting and engaging – fits in well with the emotion of brainstorming and collaborating with your coworkers. 
2. Looks modern – especially the colors and the vote and comment buttons.
3. Doesn’t look like a typical corporate app which is a really good thing.
4. Younger users were able to figure out exactly how to add an idea, that each card represented an idea, and vote and comment on their peers ideas.

In general, we haven’t heard the sentiment we were hoping to hear about delighting customers.   The feedback has been very light.

What some users disliked about Iteration #2:

1. Older users:  I don’t have any idea what these rectangles represent.  Are they ideas from other events?  Are they my events?  Are they things from other companies?   (when we probed – these users were not familiar with Pinterest or Digg or similar sites)
2. Not sure what the colors are trying to convey.  Like that they are bright and engaging – but not sure what they mean.
3. Older users:  Feels like I’m just being dropped into something and don’t have the context.  Not sure where I should start.

Iteration #3:  All Ideas page – just launched

Goals of the above new iteration #3:

1. More modern Banner, better use of space, more prominent Challenge Question
2. More functional – users can read the complete Idea description without clicking.
3. In the next iteration, we plan to have each color signify a meaning – a new idea, a favorite, something you’ve already read.

Important:
- Keep things consistent. This means all graphic styles should work together.
- All of the graphics should have a similar feel and general aesthetic appearance

Target Audience:
- Employees who work for large, US based Fortune 500 companies, in industries such as IT, Healthcare, Analytics, Financial Services, Consumer Goods, Utilities, etc.  75% of our users use their Desktop to participate.  Our app must appeal to a diverse set of users across all age groups and all levels of the company. 

At both ends of our spectrum:
1.  Executive - in his 50's - very busy with a small attention span to learn something new.  Not familiar with modern UI design (e.g. trends in the last 1-2 years).  Doesn't use Mobile for work other than checking email and texting.  If he can't figure out how to use the App in 30 seconds, he's out.

2.  Digital Native individual contributor in his late 20s.  Expects modern UI design in everything he uses.  Experience needs to be clean and familiar.  First impressions are everything - and decides if he likes Gordias in 15 seconds. 

Judging Criteria:
- How well you plan the user experience and capture your ideas visually.
- Cleanliness of your graphics and design.
- Your design should possible to build and make sense as a mobile application.

Submission & Source Files:
Preview Image
Please create your preview image as one (1) 1024x1024px JPG or PNG file in RGB color mode at 72dpi and place a screenshot of your submission within it.

Submission File
Submit JPG/PNG for your submission files.

Source Files
All original source files of the submitted design. Files should be created in Adobe Photoshop and saved as layered PSD file, or Adobe Illustrator as a layered AI file, or Sketch.

Final Fixes
As part of the final fixes phase you may be asked to modify your graphics (sizes or colors) or modify overall colors. We may ask you to update your design or graphics based on checkpoint feedback.