Developer Student Club

2019

Task and project management experience for university club

Developer Student Clubs are university communities of students from all backgrounds who are passionate about Google technologies. We work on local community problems to solve them using technology through innovation.

The Problem
‍Improve task management and project completion rates while making teams feel productive and efficient.

Overlapping of same tasks across members from multiple projects

Delay in task approvals and lack of dependency management on tasks

Tasks remain incomplete and teams feel less productive and motivated

Understanding Users

What users want: a trusted system to communicate and manage projects efficiently

Club members across multiple teams have overlapping of projects and have to wait for weekly meetings to communicate issues.

Club lead and administrators are disconnected from problems members face. They want to be updated with progress of all projects and track contribution of each member.

How might we design a system that allocates tasks, and tracks progress for users working in multiple teams?

Understanding Users

It’s only a student-run club

There are only so many resources that students have. So, we only wanted features that are critical and basic.

Available only to club members, but should be flexible to be expanded to external members for situations like getting community involved in projects and getting proposals.

The app is not funded and we wanted to make sure that it remains minimal and unwanted features are not included.

Ideation

So many ideas to just the critical and basic ones: affinity diagramming

Our tasks were designed to first get participants an idea of the dataset they were to use during the study. This was followed by checking discoverability of the feature, and then performing calculations on Power BI of various difficulty levels.

User flows and wireframing

Three scenarios with three iterations each based on continuous feedback

For all critical features within the app, I created a step-by-step user flows to better understand the dependency complexity and reduce the number of steps.

Visual Design

A minimal look based on Google’s student club guidelines that is flexible and scalable

Colors were inspired by Google's branding guidelines to create a similar identity and provide a unique experience.

The solution

Flow-based automated project management to keep everyone updated between teams and within projects

Dependency Based Connected Tasks

Project leads can now create dependency tasks which allows for streamlined flow of the project without having to wait for communication when one member completes their task.

Creating connected tasks reduces chances of duplicate work assigned to multiple members and overlapping of dependencies.

Tracked Projects

A clear visual of project progress alongside tasks for the project. Furthermore, each task has a status and deadline that auto-tracks the estimated time for the project to be completed, giving more visibility and clarity on the team's work.

Dependency Auto-Assignment

When a member completes a task, the connected tasks are activated for other members to continue working on the project without the need for a real person to assign tasks.