Workstreams.ai is a workflow management application allowing projects to stay on track, by utilizing tasks, taskboards, goals and more.
My role as the Product Design Lead was to push the product forward, solving complex challenges on new features, while optimizing existing ones through user research.
Workstreams.ai had a fairly robust design system when I joined, however my role was to make sure it gets utilized effectively and continually define new components while optimizing existing ones, as we were working on new and existing features.
We have also implemented some of the most recent best practices by overhauling the design system to be variable based for further flexibility and consistency.
The kanban board is at the centre of Workstreams.ai, allowing teams across the world to seamlessly collaborate on tasks and projects, making sure everything stays on track.
As the application originally started out as a Slack extension, which later developed into a full fledged product, communication was at the core with powerful 2-way real-time sync between Slack and Workstreams.ai.
During one of my first hackathons at the company, I decided to work on redesigning the task view, as I found many issues with the current design, including space not being used effectively, no customization options for power users, and as the chat sits at the bottom, the user is required to scroll up and down in order to get to relevant information.
While a very simple search existed when I joined, it was only used for navigation to various taskboards as a 'jump to'. What was missing was the ability to search for tasks, goals, or anything else a user might want to find. We designed a powerful and fast search experience, including a dedicated search results page where the user can further narrow things down with search filters.
As ChatGPT was setting the internet on fire and every company was racing to implement it within their product, we ended up facing a question. How do we integrate generative AI in a way that's actually helpful to users?
Considering real time chat and collaboration were at the heart of Workstreams.ai, it only made sense to design it with a focus on team members being able to directly generate, chat and vote on AI generated content.
Even though workflows were always part of Workstreams.ai, the user experience left a lot to be desired. After speaking with users we learned that people had a difficult time understanding how to use them.
Instead of tweaking existing design we completely reimagined how workflows should work to help users set up company wide processes. By looking at what each type of user needs to accomplish, the new workflows were designed around personas, greatly reducing complexity and learning curve.
