Aaron is a multi-disciplinary designer with a focus on product design. With over 15+ years in the field, he’s had the opportunity to work with agencies, consultancies, in-house and non-profits but currently prefers helping out smaller start-up teams. Some previous experiences include IDEO, Google, R/GA, Frog, Verizon, Citi, GE, Betaworks and Instapaper.
At the moment he resides in California with his wife Tina and two parrots, Taco and Burrito.
aaronkapor@gmail.com
209.604.7702
About This Site
This site is an evolving work-in-progress with selected samples from current and past projects. Equal parts process and final deliverables, it’s meant to showcase thought patterns that are unique for each project in order to create a true variety of work. It was coded and compiled with Jekyll.
Advisors (aka Feedback Response Status, aka FRS, aka Recurring Feedback) was one of those never-ending projects that kept reincarnating until it’s origins were eventually lost to history.
Below is a series of wires to illustrate the process along with highlighted features along the way – ending with higher-fedility renderings.
Matter is a service that allows professionals to send and receive quick feedback from their peers and collegues. Members are able to choose from an assortment of skills and set-up recurring feedback on a cadence of their choosing. Designing the feedback process was a fun challenge but this was one the few places where I was helping improve an existing design system, instead of owning it myself.
00 /
Peers
The original “Peers” page was built and thrown out there prior to me joining the team. It was pretty light with just a listing of people the user manually added (or automatically added via syncing contacts). It looked and felt like a placeholder, so obviously an update was needed.
01 /
FRS
I teamed up with a full-stack engineer and quickly put together the Feedback Response Status (FRS) page. It was a location – separate from the peers page – where a user could view a list of all the requests sent out. This was the first phase with known issues that we planned to solved in later phases:
A user had to travel for information that could’ve easily been on the page they just departed.
Categorized status and timestamps is nice but not a worthwhile enhancement to the UX.
It was a whole other location (intentionally repeating the first point).
02 /
Status Tags
One of the main concerns was that only 45% of feedback requests were successfully completed. The belief was that if users were notified when a request failed along with recommendations on what to do, it would improve the KPI of completion rate.
A series of email notifications along with in-app alert reviews of the feedback request did their job at raising the completed percentage.
Along with the above notifications, the second iteration of FRS introduced status tags along with corresponding CTA’s next to the timestamp.
The "Follow Up" text CTA next to the timestamp would trigger a pre-written, editable message the user could send to giver.
Notes on this iteration were:
Rationale for it being it's own separate location made more sense considering the newly added tagging system. We were discussing revamping the peers page and it would've been a bit messy to add this along with the ideas being pitched.
There still wasn't an easy way to go back and forth between the Peers page and FRS.
History of feedback exchanges was noticeably missing.
An option to set an automatic feedback schedule was also needed.
03 /
Iconography
Back to the other end of the app. "Peers" eventually turned into "Advisors" and along with it a new design that included suggestions under the mini-profile on the right side.
Along with this update, we added a "hover menu" that would reveal on hover for desktop and on tap for mobile.
An array of icons with slightly different weights for each action based on various themes.
Each icon would have to be designed up against contextual UI examples to make sure they were consistent with the rest of the set. The examples below show options for recurring feedback – the last icon to be finalized and the only one that needed a smaller indicator counterpart on the FRS page.
The set below is where we landed on. Even though the feature hadn't been released yet, a "Recurring" icon was still included since that phase was near launch.
During this phase we also introduced info modals - which could be viewed via the eye icon. It's just a way to view an advisor's information as well as take associated actions (give, receive feedback, etc). It's omething very basic yet wasn't part of the UX prior. What's nice about these is the potential for what they can hold, which we take advantage of in later phases.
04 /
Recurring
Recurring Feedback was added as a new feature at this point and along with it, an enhanced UX and an additional layer of complexity. For the Advisors page, I separated the list with recurring on top with the rest of the Advisors down below – rationale being that users' would probably prioritize Advisors they had set up recurring with.
Figuring out the recurring cadence was pretty straight-forward. Based on internal discussions and feedback we went with Weekly, Bi-Weekly, Monthly (which we recommended) and Quarterly – every 3 months.
Originally, my idea for recurring was to establish a feedback relationship with the other party before making it a regular occurrence. That was done by exchanging that initial feedback thus validating the quality of the feedback and making sure there was mutual consent.
This would prevent any unwanted obligation for the giver and limit the awkwardness of cancelling the recurring on the side of the receiver if the feedback proved less than helpful. But this prerequisite was shelved for MVP in favor of simplifying the process – allowing anybody to set up recurring right off the bat.
Recurring was also color-coded green (= go). I consciously reserved that color early on as an easy identifier used in container backgrounds and iconography.
05 /
History
One of the nice ways that Advisors synced up with FRS was providing information regarding current and historic feedback exchanges. One of the ways this could be done is the simple text link next to the timestamp that we've seen in other parts of the project.
The same link (and recurring indicator) can be found on both lists for pending requests.
Activating the link would allow the user full view of the request that was sent with some slight editing capabilities.
There's also the option to view the info modal through the hover-menu and see a complete history with feedback "receipts" if one needed to track down some helpful feedback from a few rounds ago.
This feature also keeps tracking of starting/stopping recurring. There's even an option to add a note just in case.
06 /
Library
Below is the accumulated library of assets created for this project that I appended to the larger system in storybook.
