Keshav Sundar

BayRock Labs

 BayRock Labs: Build Your Own Team

BayRock Labs: Build Your Own Team

My role: product Design Intern

tIMELINE: jUNE 2024 - July 2024

Tools Used: FIGMA, PHOTOSHOP

Overview

During the summer of 2024, I joined BayRock Labs as a Product Design Intern. BayRock Labs is a tech consultancy based in the Bay Area, California that has partnerships with the biggest companies in the country. They work with consultants from all over the world to provide software solutions for clients. For my internship project, I was tasked with designing the interface for an upcoming feature called “Build Your Own Team”.

What is Build Your Own Team?

“Build Your Own Team” is an intuitive tool that allows for clients to assemble teams of consultants for tech projects. This tool allows for clients to match and configure consultants from around the world to their project needs.

Problem

At BayRock Labs, there was a critical need amongst users: being able to build and customize a team within a single interface. The process for team building is often disjointed and stressful, with users having issues with organizing teams based on specific needs and abilities. The challenge was to create a “Build Your Own Team” feature which gives users the ability to intuitively organize team members. simplifying a complex task into an efficient experience. As a Product Design Intern, my role was to create a user-friendly interface for this feature, addressing critical pain points, and ensuring a seamless experience for users.

How Do We Fix It?

Focusing on Team Dynamics over Individuals: Shifting the focus from selecting/hiring individual consultants to building a cohesive team.

Strong Visual Design and Clarity: Enhancing the visual design and usability of the interface to ensure ease of use for clients.

Introduce Smart Features: Simplify decision making and enhancing the user-experience through built in AI support tools and budget calculators.

Research

Competitor Analysis

There were two key players aside from BayRock Labs in the consultant team-building industry: A.Team and Howdy.com.

User Research Questions

Through interviewing and surveying people that worked at BayRock as well as people that were in our circles (who worked in tech), we came to certain insights. These insights were key in how we moved forward in the design process.

  1. What does the team-building process look like for you right now?

  2. Tell me about the tools do you use. Do you find anything frustrating about them?

  3. What factors are the most important in selecting a team member?

  4. What is good teamwork to you? How do you make sure a team works well together?

  5. Do you think AI can be of assistance in team building?

  6. How do you calculate costs analyze metrics currently in your team building efforts?

Participant Overview

I conducted user interviews with 8 different participants to gain insights into the needs and challenges of users. These individuals were selected from a mix of leaders, contributors, sales team members, UX team members, and project managers.

Insights

Ease of Use:

The overwhelming majority of clients would prefer a process that is simple and straightforward.

Detailed Consultant Info:

Showcasing consultant profiles in-depth. Seeing past experience/projects allows for confidence in hiring when it comes to clients.

Communication:

Consultants that are easy to communicate with and ease of networking was favored by users.

Metrics:

Clients found it important to be able to view financial metrics within the tool. Knowing how much they are spending, where savings can be made, and the overall financial impacts were seen as a high priority.

Design Process

User Journey

Initial Prototyping and Ideation

User Testing

Following the initial prototyping, the usability testing gave insights on potential areas for improvement.

Restructuring Filters: The portions of onboarding such as “Where are you located?” and “Who do you want to work with?” were identified as unnecessary and could be addressed within the tool itself. This change would allow for a simpler user-interface and a less overwhelming onboarding process.

Establishing Design Priorities: Users felt that the prototype placed an emphasis on scheduling interviews rather than building a team. Feedback suggested a shift towards team assembly.

Readability: The Onboarding contained excessive text, which many users skimmed over. A recommendation was to break up the text and incorporate a bulleted style. This change improves readability and reduces fatigue in users.

High Fidelity Prototype

Reflections

Teamwork: Working on this project gave me the opportunity to work with a diverse team of people with different skillsets and experiences. Communication and collaboration are the foundations of teamwork, making it important to articulate your ideas clearly, and take feedback properly.

Adaptability: Balancing deadlines and tasks taught me the importance of time management. Things don’t always go according to plan, so being flexible and adjusting quickly is an important skill to have. Feedback can change the entire direction of a design, so it is important to pivot the project effectively to ensure a user centric design.

Broader Perspective: This project provided many insights on the design process from ideation to implementation. Feedback and Testing allow for designers to understand users, which aids in developing designs that puts users first.

Gratitude: The constructive feedback I received was valuable. Feedback allowed me to think critically about problems and refine my designs accordingly. This internship gave me the opportunity to become a better designer and problem solver. The experience I gained working on this project shaped me as a designer and will prepare me for future projects. I am thankful for the mentorship and guidance provided by Samir (CEO) and Suhani (UX Director) as well as many others on this journey.

Next Steps

Apply Learnings: There were many things I learned in this internship that will guide me in future projects as a designer.

Explore Applications: The concept of “Build Your Own Team” does not need to be confined to the technology industry. I think it could be interesting to explore how a tool like this could have a positive impact on other industries such as healthcare and construction.