Mark Godwin Design
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I served as the Lead Designer for a team that successfully delivered an update to the Unilever Safety Reporting app, enhancing its ability to resolve issues related to saving and syncing records. This update leveraged the underlying technology of Airsweb AVA to improve overall functionality and performance.
Unilever (by Airsweb)
Lead Designer
3 Months
Native iOS. B2B powered by Airsweb AVA’s Open Graph technology.
Lead Designer, Product Manager, Engineer, product configurator
Sketch, Azure Dev Ops, MS Teams
Airsweb developed the Unilever Safety Reporting app to support Unilever’s safety management processes. However, users encountered challenges with manual report syncing and accidental duplication due to unclear saving prompts and navigation. Recognizing the capabilities of Airsweb AVA, Unilever sought a refreshed app experience that leveraged AVA’s technology and interface for improved usability and efficiency.
Although a bigger refresh to the app the team required was only small.
82% of Unilever users reported a positive upgrade to syncing manually from the app to their AVA environment.
Data captured by Airsweb AVA’s reporting structure showed a large reduction in duplicate reports at UK sites using the app.
Unilever made a large investment into this application that Airsweb would utilise for growth.
Given our close proximity, we invited a Unilever focus group to the Airsweb offices, consisting of an EHS Manager and four daily users of the Safety Reporting app. The group also engaged colleagues from other plants across the UK via Skype to gather additional feedback. This approach allowed us to receive in-person insights and directly observe the challenges users faced with the app.
Users needed more control of syncing reports rather than the automated 'sync all' default.
Users were unaware when the app had synced with their report database.
Users were unsure when a record had saved, so would often renter the record creating a duplicate.
Some users were finding navigation difficult with the some screens looking similar so interactions would help.
Unilever liked the AVA desktop app and wanted the same appearance, but with their branding.
Working alongside the Product Manager and Engineer, I mapped out the current state of the Safety Reporting app. This process enabled me to seamlessly integrate additional screens into the user flow to address key issues, including the sync queue, syncing functionality, and save confirmations.
It also provided an opportunity to strategically plan interactions that would enhance user comprehension. Rather than simply adding interactions for visual appeal, we focused on leveraging them to improve affordance and guidance, ensuring a more intuitive user experience.
We identified a critical issue where the app did not provide clear confirmation when a report was successfully saved. As a result, users were unintentionally creating duplicate records. To address this, we redesigned the save confirmation to explicitly indicate when a record had been successfully saved to the device. Additionally, we used this as an opportunity to remind users to sync their data with the main instance of Airsweb AVA, ensuring accurate and up-to-date reporting.
Given that users often operated in environments without reliable Wi-Fi or data connectivity, a syncing queue was necessary. This allowed users to save records locally on their devices and sync them at a later time. To enhance clarity, we designed a series of interactions that provided real-time feedback on sync progress. In cases where syncing was unsuccessful, users were given the option to retry, ensuring data integrity and a seamless user experience.
Throughout the app we introduced page to page transitions that would reinforce interactions and provide additional affordance in navigation. In addition to this we would include micro interactions to improve clarity of taps on screen such as a tile appearing to be pressed against the canvas.
This was my first non-agency experience of a deal between two businesses that would see an app be built for a specific purpose.
Branding: Opinionated, difficult and always at the forefront.
Due to the app being built on AVA technology some branding of module icons had to remain in the AVA style. As a product designer you have to be open to this. You want everything to be synergised and beautiful naturally, but often you have to make exceptions based on technology and business agreements.
Ownership: "...and the potential for work out of the blue!"
The app would be owned by Airsweb but licensed to Unilever, as a result the latter could make change requests any time they needed. A client request form would have to be completed first, but the results were daunting for a lone designer. At any point in roadmap work for our other products we would have to fit in. As a result of this I became an advocate for design pipelines and began utilising tools such as Azure for design tasks. Not ideal but began my understanding of scoring workload and making better estimates. I would go on to use this heavily in future projects when implementing SCRUM.
Native Component Libraries and Consistency.
You need live component libraries, don't settle for design only. We had a series of custom components for AVA and guess what, all of them had to be rebuilt for iOS. As a result we had inputs that looked different as another live component library was used as the base. We essentially engineered inconsistency between out native app and web app.
