Zimbra Social

Role Sole Interaction Designer for most of the project. Collaborated with another Interaction Designer for a few improvements

Background In 2013, Zimbra was bought by a company called Telligent which released an Enterprise social software called communities. While they had success with it, there were some significant areas that needed improvement. I worked on those enhancements. The challenge here was that really a complete redesign was needed for an improved UX, but that was not an option. So I had to work with what we have and still design a significantly improved UX

Process

I reviewed the product thoroughly and created a list of improvements. I grouped them into the following categories:

  • UX Bugs

  • UI Cleanup Example: Inconsistent design language (things styled the same but behave differently), placement of certain items gave user the wrong impression

  • Consistency Examples: Truncation should be consistent, link to post should be consistently provided for each post, etc.

  • Usability Examples : Need a Cancel/Close button when creating new content, First Time Demo should have an option to Dismiss/Never see again, Do not enable action buttons if there are errors on the page that the user has to fix

  • Navigation Improvements

  • Feature Validity (Re-examine these features to determine if they make sense for the user persona. The user persona is someone who is looking for a highly simple experience with very clean UI. Examples: The site offered three different features - Follow, Friend, Bookmark other people. Based on our user persona, I thought that this complicated things and that we should drop the Bookmark feature and make the tradeoff to potentially give up some functionality for a simplified UX. Another example was two features - Publish to a Blog versus Publish an Announcement. Again, I thought we should give one up in favor of a simplified UX.


I have provided some examples below. Please feel free to contact mei f you need more details and examples.

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Project Outcome

I reviewed these findings with the Product Manager. After review, we added the improvements to the team's backlog. The development team began to go through some of these improvements and released several improvements. But before they could get through the entire list, they were asked to focus on other business priorities. Shortly after, Telligent and Zimbra split up. Verint acquired Teliigent and Synacor acquired Zimbra.