- 14 November, 2019 - 6 ’ read

Don’t Panic: UX is here 🆘.

Agile Scrum, Design for People, Panic Button, R&D, security, Singlewire, UX

Hello readers! It's time to tell you about an exciting feature: the arrival of the Panic Button inside the Attendant Console. Ready? Come on! Jump on the sled!

Winter is coming! Customer is the king (of the seven kingdoms)

As should know by now, Happy costumers is our very priority here at Imagicle, and as you guess, it is a goal that requires an incremental and constant effort.

That’s why we need a great recipe with a series of mixed, sophisticated ingredients combined in a general harmony: marketers, pre-sales, sales, developers, support, and from today… user experience designer!

And that’s when I come into play.

In fact, the main part of my job is to provide the best possible experience for our customers, and I started doing it straight from this Winter Release 2020 with a few super-duper new features designed to enhance the usability of your Attendant Console.

About the panic button.

Real innovations arise from real needs. In this case, the need we wanted to respond to was that of companies working in unpredictable situations, which need to make sure that their workers – but also their patients or customers – have the most effective means possible to get the help they need. In short, we wanted to help companies providing a secure environment for their facility.

After all, imagine how much easier your job would be, and how much safer your facility would be, if you could alert the authorities, an emergency number or a supervisor the instant there’s a problem.

Well, when we decided to introduce the emergency functionality in the Attendant Console, we started to imagine and design something that could make the operation simple and immediate for our users.

As you know, in high-risk situations, just a matter of seconds can mean all the difference in the world. In such cases, you can’t afford to scramble with pick up your phone, digit the number, wait for the answer.

You need fast, simple, automatic action. Like a simple red button on the application you have in front of you while you work, just a click away, which automatically starts the call you need to fix the situation.

And we’re not talking about an isolated case. Many organizations need to ensure safety to maintain their quality and trust standards. Think about work areas such as health, school, finance, banks, security.

Whatever your business is, all you have to do is clicking on the red button on your Console, and you’ll immediately initiate an emergency call, alerting the authorities, the company security staff or non-security staff like a medical emergency number that will intervene.

Of course, another fundamental thing is that the panic button is easily accessible and placed in a safe zone to avoid involuntary triggers.

What we needed, in short, was a Panic Button. And that’s exactly what you’ll find in your Attendant Console starting from Imagicle Winter Release 2020.

After long research and testing, we found a perfect place for its position and design, as you can see in the preview below.

Moreover, we wanted it to be as adaptable as possible. Therefore we have enabled the possibility of associating a specific emergency number with the button or triggering your existing emergency notification system.

In that case, our recommendation certainly goes to Singlewire Informacast.

Are you wondering who Singlewire is?

I’ll tell you right away.

Singlewire is an American company based in Madison, which develops and supports voice applications. The Company offers network-based solutions for mass notification, emergency communication, overhead paging, and school bell software, serving K-12, higher education, healthcare, government, business, and manufacturing sectors worldwide.
Thanks to his attention to security and the most advanced technologies to ensure it, Singlewire has had great success in the US and is a key reference partner for Cisco.

So yes… we have some new friends, and this is only the first step of our path with them!

And now, let’s see how and where the answers to the questions were born, what made them possible, and how we built them.

That is, let’s dive together in the realm of the UX, aka User Experience.

What is user experience design, and why is it so important?

As we said, user experience design is the process of creating products able to provide relevant and satisfactory experiences to users. Basically, it integrates a product, including aspects of graphic design, usability, and function, before the product gets to the customer.

A guy once said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works”.

Well, helping people to complete their tasks easily and smoothly is my job; making people happy while using Imagicle products is my vocation. It means that, in addition to the beautiful user interface design (UI), we’ll add a process to bring the user to the very center of the scene.

Every day, I work on user research, interaction design, information architecture, data analysis, usability, human-computer interaction, psychology, and design, sharing the best ideas and the best solutions to the team.

It’s a matter of synthesis and versatility, but above all, it’s a matter of empathy; it is all about improving the experience that people have during the interaction with our products, ensuring that the value and commitment behind each of our products is perceived.

This is the philosophy that leads to the creation of functionalities specifically designed to meet your special needs.
In the case of the panic button, to make your environment safer.

How to insert UX in Agile Scrum?

My first efforts aimed to include both in-depth users’ research and its relationship with our products into the process.

But how to do it correctly without negatively impacting a well-oiled gear already at full speed? During my daily feed reading, I found the answer: a workshop in Milan named “Leveraging Lean UX to Lead Successful Agile Design Teams” held by Jeff Gothelf (I was very impressed by his book “Lean UX” a few years ago)!

There was no time to waist! I called the R&D Scrum Masters straight away, and we arranged to go together.
It turned out to be a fantastic experience; we found lots of exciting ideas and started to integrate Jeff’s valuable advice into our processes immediately.

The most useful thing about the event, though, was confirming that the road we took was the right one. Now we know how to do it properly, so, we’ll just keep improving and learning to achieve the best result!

Winter 2020: a snowfall of UX!

The R&D team worked hard to bring improvements, new features, and a fresh breeze to our products for this Winter 2020 release.

The UX contribution arrived at the right time, to warm up the coming winter with an even simpler experience, improving the development of some important innovations, such as:

Panic Button feature on Attendant Console
Advanced search on Attendant Console
Introduction of colleagues’ pictures into the Attendant Console and Cisco Jabber
Accessibility and interface improvements

And this is just the beginning of a long and joyful journey to let our customers enjoy new useful, easy-to-use, outstanding features across the Imagicle products.

Finally, we have the ultimate formula to share with you.

UX+UI+Imagicle=HCX (Happy Customer Experience)

#dontpanic #stayimagicle