Marcel AI Platform: Productivity Tools
Overview
Designed and developed in partnership with Microsoft, Marcel is an AI platform aimed at shifting Publicis Groupe from an outdated holding company model to an open enterprise level platform that connects 80,000 talented employees, across 200 disciplines in 130 countries for more seamless communication and collaboration.
The initial outcome was to launch a mobile app to Publicis Groupe employees for both iOS and Android and a desktop component shortly after. The pilot app was scheduled to roll out to employees in the U.K. in the spring of 2019.
My role on this project
I lead product design and acted as the product owner for productivity tools in Marcel which included the integration of Microsoft Office 365 Email and Calendar, Oracle and Altair time-tracking systems, as well as Box and OneDrive cloud file management systems.
Problem statement
How can Marcel remove barriers to productivity from our existing tools and allow Publicis Group employees to spend less time completing mundane tasks and more time doing the work that they love?
User research
A survey was conducted among Publicis Groupe employees. Participants represented various sectors of Publicis, a mixture of seniority ranging from Junior Associate to Director & Above, and a variety of departments including creative, tech, human resources, business development, etc. Our research helped us understand:
- Day to day usage of productivity tools
- Tasks associated with these tools
- Perceived levels of productivity throughout the day
- Barriers to productivity
Goals for productivity tools in Marcel
The outcome of our user research helped refine a vision for these productivity tools and start to shape our product features as we moved into product design and development.
Calendar
Cloud Storage
Timesheets
Product design
Marcel is a platform that utilizes NLP (natural language processing). Our team started creating decision trees for primary use cases, or intents, to understand how we could extract relevant information from a user’s dialogue to fulfill an intent. Once our decision trees were validated, we started introducing UI in the form of low-fidelity wireframes and prototypes – working closely with the our partner, Microsoft to define these product features.
Experience design principles
Our experience design principles informed the design of our product features.
Keep it conversational
Be proactive
Reduce friction
Project learnings
- Communicate effectively: Clear, consistent communication across teams and with stakeholders was absolutely necessary to save a lot of time doing re-work. This was especially true with having well articulated feature stories.
- Prioritization is crucial: You can do anything, but you cannot do everything. Prioritization and continuous refinement of the product backlog allowed our team to launch with a clear vision for an MVP that would deliver incremental value to our employees. It also helped manage out of scope requests and set reasonable expectations with our stakeholders.
- Data heavy projects are a lot of fun: This project challenged me creatively to think of novel ways to use data points to solve problems and create new, meaningful experiences within the constraints of our current productivity toolkit.
- Product design is never done: We continue to gain valuable insights from feedback received from our beta users. Our team has a very healthy product backlog that will only continue to grow as our users gradually change and Marcel is rolled out to new geographies.
