Building chat tools for Front Line Workers - Microsoft Kaizala
OVERVIEW
Kaizala is a messaging app, a lot like WhatsApp. It is a simple and secure work management and mobile messaging app. It is a phone-number based, simple, and secure mobile chat app that enables you to connect and coordinate work across your network your organization, vendors, partners, suppliers, and customers.In several countries such as India, Phillipines, Malaysia etc., - this app is used by Front line workers for work-related conversations. Through a number of growth initiatives we were able to reach 5 Million MAU from 2 Million MAU in 6 months.​
ROLE
Strategy
Design
TIMELINE
Jun 2018 -
Sep 2019
I’ve led end-to-end design for several growth initiatives in Kaizala. Notably -
• Location Sharing Experiences
• First Run Experience
• Sharing Greeting Cards
• Democratizing Public Groups
• Chat scenarios for open directory
• Profile tab
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Here are a few stories/use cases that talk about the end-to-end solutions we have built for:
STORY #1 : HELPING USERS SHARE LOCATION ON KAIZALA
Kaizala is used by delivery agents, and traveling salespeople who get work done as they move. But, India is a low-trust society where they want proof of where their delivery agents actually are. So, How do we enable accurate sharing of location between people leveraging our services for work chat?
APPROACH
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As a team, we spoke to several delivery agents and their supervisors to understand the problem better. Supervisors expect to see live location and expected time for delivery to track their agents better. Agents also mentioned it would be better if they could mark their attendance with photographic proof.
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We also analyzed how Whatsapp and iMessage allowed their users to share locations on the chat
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As a triad, we decided to improve the overall framework of the location-sharing experiences and then picked up case-by-case scenarios to fix the whole interface.​
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We ran the designs with our users and iteratively developed them phase-wise based on user-inputs.
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• Sharing Location
Users now have the ability share to their current location, their live location, or any selected location which can be accessed by clicking the action palette. When users share their location, a live path is shown. It also shows the time between the starting point and the ending point when the live location sharing is stopped.
When users click on sharing current location, they can also show nearby places around the current location to share in events accuracy cannot be determined.
• Requesting Location
Request Location is a standalone action card that users can send on Kaizala, allowing them to request location information from other users, even in private groups. This was one of the most requested features on Kaizala that helped supervisors and managers request location information from their subordinates as a primary use case. As users respond to the share location request, a live path is shown. Again, it also shows the time between the starting point and the ending point when the live location sharing is stopped. On the chat screen, within the action card there is a counter that shows the number of people the location was requested from and number of responses.
OUTCOMES
• Designed Location Experiences helped about half a million users share and request location info on Kaizala.
• The experience was unique and we saw customers opting to use Kaizala business suite because of this feature.
• Although Kaizala went into maintenance mode as of 2020, a lot of group functionalities were plugged into the Teams. “Teams for Life” team has planned to integrate several of these Location features with FLWs in mind.
STORY #2 : DESIGNING THE FIRST RUN EXPERIENCE FOR KAIZALA
I led the effort to redesign the first-run experience for Kaizala at the beginning of 2019. We needed to do this, as we were noticing drop-offs right after users installed the app. As we also expanded the business value of the app, we needed users to have an interactive and personalised onboarding experience that improved engagement.
APPROACH
We, as a team fetched numbers for each point of drop-off across the funnel and introduced visuals and animation that would pique the interest of our users. We added engaging loaders and interactions where users could add their profile pictures as an effort to personalise experiences for our users.
The redesigned flow had a mix of illustrations I drew to maintain branding and storytelling. Previously 23% of the users would drop off at the permissions screen as it was thrown at the users even before the flash screen appeared. Top rectify this, we added an engaging loader to give a glimpse of what kaizala can do for our users.
We then introduced the FRE screens, providing as much context and clarity that aids them to complete the onboarding easily. We encouraged users to add profile pictures during the onboarding that helped create engagement in public groups.
We also explored the idea of adding hello cards for freshly onboarded users to send to their contacts. Almost like a conversation starter for our fresh users. Furthermore, we explored the idea of sending these hello cards in the chat canvas, which is live now.
OUTCOMES
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The redesigned FRE flow reduced drop-offs by 8% from 88% to 96%.
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More people signed up on the app with a new profile picture that drove engagement because of the likes and comments model associated with them.
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We saw the creation of new conversations as most users now sent hello cards instead of typing their first messages.
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You can download Kaizala and try the new experience!
