an image prtraying several steps in an invite flow

Touchless Sign in and the Early Days of the Pandemic

SUMMARY

We aimed to streamline touchless check-in at kiosks during the early days of COVID-19. My focus was on safety and ease of use for employees and cleaners. Our team integrated new touchless features as solutions.

ROLE

Product Designer / PM

YEAR

2019 - 2020

TEAM

1 Product Designer, 2 Engineers

RESPONSIBILITIES

Spec creation and facilitation, Interaction Design, UI Design, testing, client and leadership presentation

Goals

The primary objective was to redesign Envoy's check-in system to enable a touchless experience, meeting the immediate health and safety demands presented by the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Research

As the pandemic began, we received an influx of customer inquiries focused on safety and hygiene. Both employees and cleaning crews needed a touchless, intuitive way to sign in via the Envoy kiosk. The urgency was evident; companies were eager to adopt preventive measures while maintaining operational efficiency. Over the course of several weeks we did interviews with the workplace teams at companies like Lululemon to better understand their needs and their challenges.

Problems and Opportunities

Problems:

  1. 1. Check-in processes did not adhere to social distancing and hygiene best practices.
  2. 2. A surge in customer demand for new features specifically geared towards safety.

Opportunities:

  1. 1. Strengthen brand loyalty by swiftly addressing immediate customer needs.
  2. 2. Differentiate Envoy from competitors by offering cutting-edge, touchless solutions.
a gif showing the full sign in flow
Invite acceptance flow

Hypotheses

1. Integrating Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology will facilitate a more seamless touchless check-in experience.

2. Allowing visitors to sign in to the kiosk from their phone will increase overall safety outcomes

3. Adapting to an updated UI design would increase user adoption rates through better understanding of patterns.

4. Addressing edge cases for visitor permissions will enhance overall security.

The workflow with edge cases
The workflow for presence required with the two main edge cases

Solutions

Updates to previous invite UI moving it into a more traditional modal
UI updates to the Visitor Invite
a gif showing the full sign in flow
BLE pings are intermittent, pull to refresh demo

Design Overhaul: A redesigned user interface aimed to put upcoming invites top of mind for folks - literally. Aesthetics aligned with new mobile platform design languages gives the app itself a more refined feel and gives users a clear expectation on what things should look and feel like. This work also aligns our app with updated branding guidelines at the time.

Touchless Features: BLE technology was incorporated to detect a user’s proximity, enabling touchless sign-ins. This tech was super helpful in fulfilling some of the needs of customers. Trying to keep surfaces free of germs as much as possible was the name of the game.

Edge Cases: Developed robust workflows to address different scenarios where a visitor might lack necessary location permissions or be too far away from the kiosk. either of these situations results in messaging that gets you to a "learn more" state that gives you instructions on how to fix it. Apple's Location Services checks, specifically can be problematic if a user has previously said 'no' or turned them off.

Learnings

Stay Customer-Centric: Responding to user needs in real-time strengthens brand reliability and showed the world that we were serious about building the workforce platform for the future.

Technological Agility: The move to swiftly integrate new technologies like BLE was crucial. It not only distinguished us from competitors through acting quickly, it gave us the ability to ship to learn. Taking that risk made all the difference. This work would become the building blocks for all the workplace features that now exist, like Rooms and Scheduling.


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