Colin Elliot

Team contacts

Using outcomes from a foundational study, my team targeted a set of small openly collaborative agent teams for an early access contact sharing program. Principal agents could enable ‘team contacts’ which then allowed team members to opt-in to a shared contact pool.

The solution included easy Role Based Access Control (RBAC) setup and onboarding, in-app help, timely notifications, plus clear access status and control for all team members.

Design solution v1

Expanding the team contacts design to a platform solution meant the design had to enable selective sharing for resources such as marketing, listing presentations and tours, as well as contacts. Considerations included how permissions would cascade down to attachments, support for URL sharing as well as sharing that required access/authentication. Our components also had to support integrations such as tasks – that didn't use the main invite UI but did use the back-end services.

We created a flexible set of components that could be consumed by individual product team designers and engineers, and our team launched the solution with our first internal customer.

Working with the Design System (DS) team, who were also part of Core Experiences, I identified and drove alignment around ownership of new variants of existing components, proposed new complex components, and helped define interaction patterns that were central to platform collaboration.

Feedback & testing

With this launch we resolved one of the most highly upvoted Canny posts with upwards of 600 agent votes. It addressed a need for 81% of agents (on a team of two or more). My work contributed to a BTFS launch CSAT score of 4.31 out of 5 and BT surpassed its adoption OKR of 45% of agents engaging weekly.

The solution had some existing feature gaps, like adding a note to an invite and inviting partners outwith Compass, that suppressed cross-platform adoption.

When consulting with partner teams, I provided experience design leadership and guidance and joined the dots between collaborative workflows and platform-level pattern design. I used this consultation work as Discovery for v2, tracking open questions, divergent patterns, and requirements.

I was part of a project team that created a design-led future vision for the 'lead to close' agent journey. Independently, I investigated other ways to support agent collaboration such as @mention sharing and multimodal experiences like a Compass for Android Auto.

Using existing user research and agent interviews the design team identified the key collaborative moments, pain points, user roles, and opportunities on an end-to-end journey map. From there we were able to focus on the areas of greatest impact and create narrative stories that integrated the feature requirements into a collaborative user journey.

Design solution v2

We designed the collaboration invite experience to be modular. This allowed the solution to support variable use cases and provide flexibility - while maintaining a level of governance and consistency that made the experience feel familiar and intuitive across the entire platform.

The resulting collaboration platform provides Compass with a scalable, configurable, flexible, and consistent foundation for collaborative experiences that drive design and engineering efficiency, and simplify the complexity of agent workflows. The intricacies behind our authorization, teams, access management, tasks, and collaboration services are hidden behind a clean, easy-to-use ‘manage access’ interface.

My contributions to Compass helped influence product and experience decisions, and a 25% (CRM) and 35% (BT) YoY increase in MAU. My work for the Core Experience team is creating connected, functional, collaboration experiences for users across the Compass platform – today.

Impacts & learning

We created a refined front-end solution and scalable, extensible cross-platform patterns for a set of complex back-end services. It’s easy to make complex and it’s complex to make easy.

Diverge, track, merge

Don’t restrict design evolution and experimentation for the sake of conformity. If a solution works, let’s see if we can merge and align at a platform level.

Next steps

Revisit the vision work, simplify and focus on product experience. Look at collaboration as a hub and further invest in multimodal and connected experiences that empower agents where they are.

As staff designer at Compass, I led strategy and design for connected, functional, collaboration experiences across the platform.

Overview

Customer