Cisco Spark New Call
Product design, mobile design
#1 Calling History Intro
Cisco Webex Teams, used to be known as Cisco Spark, is an app for continuous teamwork with messaging, video meetings, file sharing and white boarding. It was an outcome of transiting and migrating Webex meetings into a more collaborative tool to better serve practitioners in their work environment with security.
Each year, there is a real estate savings of 485M dollars tied to adaptive collaboration workspaces which equals 6K per employee. We always believe, Calling, as one of the biggest activities that Cisco Webex Teams supports, plays a huge role in the use case of the whole app.
From the design we used to have (shows below), we can see that it has a very parallel (no.3) bottom bar navigation for message, teams, calls and meetings. And it creates a history every time when there is a (no.2) scheduled meeting or a call happen. It can only (no.4 & no.5) call one people each time for mobile and the experience in searching for the target that users want to call is really bad.
#2 Issues
- Structure The feature doesn’t fit into the new structure after the architecture changes (collaboration-centric).
- Function The most cases for calling is group call and phone call, but currently Webex teams is limited to only call one person or one device each time which is not useful based on the data and clients’ feedback. 71% of knowledge workers call from phones often and 65% prefer to take business calls on a desk phone (IP phones). 91% users agree phone calls remain an important communication mode.
- Concept definition Confusing of mixing space meetings history with calling history
- Bad search experience No design when users try to call a personal room (PMR) or a SIP address/video address.
#3 New Story Optimization
Persona
First, we want to re-confirm our target user’s behavior and needs, thus we utilize Persona and User journey map to go over the calling flow over and over again to confirm what we want to improve from the design. We used one of our real client, Ford Motor as our example, creates a persona named James Weston and analyzed his daily flow when using Cisco Webex Teams app.
Ideal flow
Limitations
From the flow, we can see, ideally, the long term goal is that users can create a new call by adding all the resources on Cisco Spark, from an account user, a space, a identifiable device. However, the current behavior is that only account users or devices can be added to form a space. For phone number, SIP address or PMR call, it can only be called one at each time.
#4 Wireframes
Based on the limitations mentioned above, we modified the scope for each phase. For 1:1 call, including call a Personal Room, a SIP address or phone number, users can achieve from “search to call”. For new group call, which can only be people or device, users can access from group call entry. The reason we offer call search but not only use global search is because, they are serving different purpose: Cisco Spark is not a message or call/meeting centric app but a space based app, thus when searching can show existing space only but for call search we do offer all the source/entries of devices, PMRs and Contacts.
#5 Final Design
1. Call default page
For new users’ first time experience, except the onboarding coach mark we offered (no included in the image below), we also offered simple suggested people component based on the org configuration by system. It suggested people from your team (Pic 1.1). Then after using for a while, it will suggest based on a combined logic of the most interact people and most active people who are in the same space with the users. After users start using the call function, it will show the call history (Pic 1.2)right below the user’s own personal room and maximum 10 records (Pic 1.3).
On the landing page of call, from our marketing data and the analysis of call history, the most use case is to call certain people or call what users used to call again (usually users will have several certain people or space to call). That’s why we synthesize the potential call targets and offer one-tap-to-call here.
2. Separating the entries of Call single target, call multiple people and call a phone number
Because in the new Webex Teams call design, we not only support call people or device, but also international phone number and all sorts of devices, also we enable the group call (for people only) thus, from the interaction side, it’s easier to separate single target call (a person, a space, a device, a phone number or a URL/SIP address etc) with group call (multiple people).
For search to call, we keep the searching pattern same across the platform like Pic 4 on the right side. Also, we continue the pattern for creating new space based activity (like create a space, new message, schedule meeting).
3. Group call case
Based on our research, start a new group call is the most case that people use new call activity (If users want to call a group of people who are not in a space or they can’t remember any) but as users are creating more and more spaces, most of the situations that the users can’t remember each space clearly, thus we have recommendations for the names that the users put in which make it maximum usage of each spaces in stead of creating many duplicated ones.
4. Search to call behavior
When users first time tap on search to call, there will be an alert bar on the bottom ask for contacts permission for users to search call any person from their contacts.
When the user starts typing to search, the results will be fall into different categories: people, space, device and personal rooms.
If connecting user’s contacts, then show the matched results from local contacts as one independent category. If users call phone number or video/SIP addresses which are not existed in the app database, then show them as single category of recent calls.
5. Search no results
If users are searching a SIP address which never called before for example or a new user email, then it will show matched action: to call SIP address or invite this email account to Cisco Spark.
6. Interstitial page to in call experience
All the calls will first land to interstitial page which aligns with the in-space call activity behavior. After users start the call, then the space will be created and users can navigate back to the home page (space list) to do multi-tasking and view other notifications.
#6 Next Step
For calls, we have two more ideas now to add on, the first one is a missed call notification. Currently we have a meeting center on the home page and we want to make call feature same priority with meetings, thus to engage more call activities for call, we are proposing a missed call center to collect all the missed call history on the home page. The other one is to synthesize the call flow to make it simpler and easier, optimizing the input process to call single/multiple items at one time.
