Where did TCS come from

With over 350,000 employees and global operations in over 40 countries TCS is dependent on strong tools that allow meaningful collaboration and communication across their many divisions, teams and projects. To strengthen these collaboration and communication efforts, we helped TCS design and develop 2 more products - Fresco Docs and Fresco Talk. Both these products are heavy duty cross platform applications, built to scale and serve the large employee force of TCS under one seamless ecosystem. While Talk is much like modern collaboration tools such as Slack, Docs is a strong file management and sharing system quite similar to Dropbox. 

Beyond basic features of Slack and Dropbox, Talk and Docs also have a whole slew of interesting but complex features. Most of our efforts were concentrated on getting a deeper understanding of the use cases behind these features, and ensuring that the user isn't exposed to the actual complexity behind them

Setting up conference calls

Everyone working in larger organisations knows how difficult it is to set up conference calls. It can seem impossible to get everyone at a particular time, and often the organiser ends up spending more time setting up the call than the actual duration of the call. We eased up this process by integrating conference calls as a seamless and self explanatory part of the normal group chats in the Fresco Talk app

This video shows the flow of setting up conference calls

By progressively disclosing the information needed to set up a conference call, we circumvented the long form format of the existing conference call setup. We were aware that our designed progression was by no means a known UI pattern, but we consciously deviated from the standard to serve the simplest call setup progression.

Find what you are looking for

A major challenge was simplifying the search in both Talk and Docs, but at the same time ensuring that it remained comprehensive enough to deliver precise search results. We started by analysing existing search and filter patterns and got a deeper understanding of how the search patterns in a chat app are different from the ones in a file sharing scenario. Being a bit imaginative with motion design also helped the cause immensely. Not only did the search end up being quite straightforward, it also felt very humanised because of the way it formed complete sentences when the user applied filters to her search.

Finding the right message or a file that got shred weeks or months ago can be very tricky. This video shows how we solved the problem.

In the file sharing app Fresco Docs, we designed a different system to provide the quickest results to the user when she is looking for a particular file. Here we emphasised on different filetypes and metadata to allow quicker access.

The filter on docs uses a combination of time stamp and filetypes

Stay in control

It's important for the user to be able to use the app while file uploads run in the background. Especially for an app that will be used very frequently. The challenge for us was to keep the user in control of the upload while not restricting her interaction with the rest of the app. The current upload details can be expanded with one tap for some last minute changes, or just to monitor the progress of individual file uploads.

The upload doesn't interrupt the other functionalities of the the app.

Making sure the right information is (only) in the right hands is very critical for a large enterprise like TCS. Different permission settings allow the owners of folders and files to stay in control.

Permission settings for files are based on existing models.

Android Vs iOS

Considering that the entire project was time boxed to only 6 weeks, building both android and iOS was tough. We had consider that our main user weren’t super tech enabled youngsters but also middle aged employees who have been with the organisation for a long time and who are not familiar with the latest trends and ui patterns on the different platforms. While we usually convert the information architecture very similarly, in this case we tried to make use of the most established and familiar patterns of each platform. We were risking that there would be significant differences between the platforms but we wanted to make sure that users can navigate the app without having to learn anything new.

The above 3 pairs show exactly the same screens on the the different platforms. the functionalities are the same but the layout is based on the platform specific guidelines. 

In Conclusion

Working with a large Organisation like TCS was a challenge we enjoyed a lot. The most fascinating part in this engagement was probably the search and filter options in both the apps, and the option to schedule calls on the go. Both scenarios required an extensive set of options without complicating the most essential use cases.