A native app helping people live and work abroad, a solution to the global phenomena of the great resignation during covid 2022.
Project brief
Designing a native mobile and web-based app for PwC Global which enables and facilitates PwC’s together anywhere program, as a solution to combat the attrition rate and the great resignation.
Client type
PwC, top four global consultancy firms / Fortune 500
My role
The process
1.1 Design process, my approach
Research phase
User research and analysis
The first step was to research about the policies determined in the together anywhere program which enables any PwC employee to live and work from anywhere in the world for a period of 8 week in a year. The first step was to map out the different types of personas that could use the program for its different intended purposes.
There was research about the company global policy which highlighted key constraints for the user group. The next stage was to conduct workshops to understand user needs in mural and conduct in-person interviews with users from different demographic groups.
The data revealed 8 personas with different needs for the application, of which there were three primary personas which comprised of to 70% of the users. Based on persona, there were user journey maps designed in mural, mapping out touch points, pain points and special needs of each group.
Discovery workshops
Four remote workshops in Mural with mobility, tax, risk and the product team, run as timed sections with a stated outcome each. They took the programme from a written policy to a set of opportunity statements the squad could design against.
Discovery interviews
Twenty-four PwC employees across five offices, recruited to span the demographic split of the workforce rather than the people most likely to volunteer.
What we asked
- What stops people applying for a secondment at all
- How a host decides to open their home to a colleague
- Which parts of the policy are read, misread or ignored
- What trust looks like between two strangers at the same firm
- Where the current process already breaks down
Key learnings
- Eight personas emerged, three of them accounted for 70% of the user base
- Uncertainty, not cost, was the main blocker, people did not know where to begin
- The internal directory was already doing this job badly over chat and email
- Hosts wanted control over dates and house rules before they would list at all
- Tax and visa questions surfaced in every single interview
Synthesised in Mural into journey maps and empathy maps per persona, which became the input to requirement mapping.
Planning phase
Roadmap and agile sprint planning
Based on this data, the sprint plan and product roadmap was created in collaboration with the product owner, business analyst and product manager. Azure dev ops was used for project management for Together Anywhere app, and 2 weeks sprints (with daily stand ups), product backlog, and roadmap was mapped for the 6 months.
I conducted feature prioritization sessions, sprint retros, and managed bug fixes along with the QA that took place during the project.
Defining phase
Requirement mapping
After the user interviews and understanding their frustrations, the requirement criteria was created along with the functional use cases. Next step was to design a list of features for the backlog and conduct prioritization session, design a spec map which was a join collaboration between the BA and the design lead (me).
The user flows, and ideal journey maps were created for the possible travel of the users. This is also when similar products were studied like Airbnb, Gumtree, Amazon marketplace, Facebook marketplace, housemate.com, and meet up, as the product was a combination of them.
Ideation phase
Ideation, information architecture and card sorting
The next stage was ideation, where in multiple versions of low-fi ideas and information architecture was mapped on paper and shortlisted based on the card sorting method for feature prioritization. Wireframes were then created in Figma after which the material design was created using atomic design principles in Figma. Next using components and assets, I created a final Figma prototype for release 1, which was set off for development.
Design system
An atomic library built for two platforms and every user
Together Anywhere ships as a native iOS and Android app and a web app, built by two development squads. A shared system was the only way to keep one product voice across three codebases, so I built it in Figma on atomic design principles, tokens, then atoms, then molecules, then screen templates, mapped one-to-one onto Material components so Android inherited platform behaviour for free and iOS only needed the deltas.
Accessibility was written into the system rather than audited at the end. Every token, component and state below carries its own WCAG 2.1 AA acceptance criteria, so a developer picking a component out of the library gets the accessible version by default and QA has something objective to test against.
1.7 Colour tokens and measured contrast
PwC's brand palette is warm and high-chroma, which is exactly the palette most likely to fail on contrast. I measured every pairing and gave each colour a rule about where it is allowed to appear, rather than leaving it to judgement.
Colour is never the only signal: availability, verification and booking status each pair their swatch with an icon and a written label, so the states survive both greyscale and the eight percent of male users with colour vision deficiency.
1.8 Type scale
A six-step scale on a 4pt baseline. Body sits at 16pt so it never falls under the 16px minimum, and every text style is declared in relative units so the app reflows correctly at the 200% dynamic-type setting without truncation or overlap.
1.9 Touch targets and spacing
An 8pt spacing scale, and a hard rule that every interactive element owns a 48 × 48pt hit area even when it draws smaller. Listing cards were the worst offender in testing, favourite, share and message all sat inside a 32pt row until this rule pushed them apart.
Component states
Each component in the library ships with all six states drawn and specified, default, hover, focus, pressed, disabled and error, so focus is never left to the browser or the platform default.
1.10 Accessibility criteria built into the library
The app is used by PwC staff worldwide, including colleagues who rely on screen readers, larger text and switch control. These were the acceptance criteria attached to the component library, tested in UAT on VoiceOver and TalkBack alongside the sighted focus groups.
Low-fi prototype
Drawn in greyscale so the testing sessions judged the flow and the words rather than the styling. Both primary journeys got a flow of their own, laid out from the card sort and the journey map, and reviewed against Nielsen’s heuristics and WCAG 2.0 AA before it went into the prototype.
Navigation settled as explore, people, trips and profile. Listings moved under profile once the card sort showed people read the word as “places I can stay”, not “places I have listed”.
Journey one, finding and requesting a stay
Journey two, hosting a colleague
Delivery phase
Development, UAT and bug fixes
There was a very close collaboration between me and the dev team, and we had our own Dev design sessions daily in addition to the team stand ups, there was a user acceptance test that was scheduled for 3 focus groups from the top three personas, each comprising of 8 people.
The user acceptance test was done on four iOS and four android devices, and the experience of the users were recorded using a screen recorder. The test users later had to report on glitches, functionality and UI elements and their navigation through a carefully designed questionnaire form.
The findings of the UAT were logged as bugs in the query logs. There was also a special Bug prioritization session which led to improvisations in the release planning and roadmaps, based on the capabilities of the dev team to deliver in time.
High fidelity wireframes
The same two journeys taken to high fidelity on the component library, then reflowed for the web app so a host can manage a listing from a laptop and a traveller can browse on a phone.
Responsive web
Result
Operational in 136 PwC locations, with 364,000 users worldwide.
The native app is now operational in 136 PwC locations and reaches 364,000 employees worldwide. It launched nationally first, taking over 300 listings in its first month with an average session length of 7 minutes.
It was first rolled out in 2022 on a $5M budget, launching across New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the US and the UK.