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Lenovo

Leading Lenovo's First Commercial SaaS Offering: ThinkSmart Hub 700

2016 - 2019  |  Lead Designer

As the world's largest PC company, Lenovo launched adjacent solutions for the enterprise space starting with office collaboration devices.

I led the design of our first hardware & software solution including UX, UI, and User Research. It was the first time Lenovo developed a HW+SW solution from 

Business Objective

Lead the launch of Lenovo's next Billion-Dollar business in Smart Office solutions including hardware, software, and services.

Design Objective

Provide design leadership across all products and experiences to get this new business off the ground and achieve revenue milestones.

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WHY I CAME TO LENOVO

2016

I joined Lenovo to take on the challenge of turning an idea into a new business opportunity. My responsibility was to lead a new emerging business called Smart Office which focused on dedicated collaboration devices for the workplace. Working closely with the Next UX team, we brainstormed, ran workshops, reviewed competitor products, analyzed market trends, interviewed customers, and finally, designed the solution we knew would transform the collaboration industry.

We started with this question:

What do our customers actually want to do?

MARKET & USER RESEARCH

We visited several customers to listen to their pain-points, view their workspaces and technologies, observe their ways of working, and most importantly, identify their needs.

We can always solve issues, but our goal was to identify the correct ones.

From MK Smart Office Roadmap and Positio

Image Description: This was a photo of one of our customer's conference rooms. It's common to see various technologies, cables, devices, and information placards taking up most of the table.

We compared these learnings with our market research data. We found that companies were looking to improve their conference room experience and invest heavily in it over the next 5-10 years. Meeting room frustrations remained one of the top issues for office productivity and we wanted to find a way to solve it.

We also found that companies were looking to invest in smaller rooms called huddle rooms. These intimate workspaces were more popular than large conference rooms that are rarely fully occupied.

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Our focus was to provide the best holistic user experience to our customers. This meant that hardware and software had to seamlessly work together which also meant they had to be designed together.

This was the first time Lenovo would design the hardware and software together from the beginning. Our next step was to figure out how we would actually do it.

My role was to lead the design and strategy from idea to production.

The challenge was that this was new territory for Lenovo and I was literally on my own.

IDEATION

In the beginning, we explored several ideas using all sorts of mediums: white boards, sketching, prints, Post-its, videos, word play, charades - anything that could get ideas flowing and discussions moving.

THE GOAL

During our brainstorm sessions, our main goal was to establish our MMF list for Gen1. There were so many features we could cover, but we knew we had to focus on simplicity and evolve from there.

Here was our criteria:

  • What was critical to the success of this project and how would we measure it?

  • What features could we roll out as Over the Air (OTA) updates instead of squeezing it into Release 1?

  • What would make the rest of the industry nervous if we solved it?

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LO-FI PROTOTYPING

From wireframing to mock-ups, I generated hundreds of layouts, grids, and frameworks focused on minimizing user friction and designing for the most common use cases. I knew that if we could predict what users would do most of the time, it would boost their positive experience with the product.

I studied several interaction models and created more than 10 different working prototypes for both internal review and external user studies.

The biggest challenge was designing for a large display that would be several feet in front of the user. It was similar to navigating a streaming service on a family room TV. We would need to design the experience to scale across different formats and form factors.