Hi, I'm James Ning

PORTFOLIO

ART

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The background

Inside large scale companies, one of the crucial aspects of managing their day to day operations is handling tickets and inquiries from employees. These could range from a simple question about a department's contact number, to requiring immediate technical support for PC issues. The more time users spend jumping through hoops looking for answers to their questions, the less things are getting done, and potentially leading to frustrating experiences.To get a better idea of what we can do to make things easier, I analyzed the search data of various internal platforms to see what questions users typically ask. As it turns out, many instances of such information search can be categorized as some form of "FAQ" - repeatedly asked questions that can usually be answered within one or two lines (either by directly answering the question or redirecting to a document containing the guides). For example, the most common questions are related to setting up mobile access to company sites. For various reasons, this process might currently take users multiple steps to get to. That is, if you know where to look.

The solution

I drafted the idea of creating a dedicated web portal to reduce the cost of knowledge searching. Based on the categories of inquiries, a quick glance at the page should allow 50+% of the users to find what they need. The search bar provides global search to all FAQ documents if the user chooses to use it.

After reducing the number of inquiries through FAQ, the inquiries that are more complex will be handled through a ticketing system. I designed an entry point for users to search for and submit forms. Commonly used forms will also be recommended to the users. Some types of inquiries need to be filled out and submitted repeatedly, thus a favorite feature is included for quick access.

The background

The global temperatures are rising. The evidences are clear, and heat trapping greenhouse gases are the undeniable culprits. Corporations in the current age have the social responsibilities of reducing their operational emissions to attend to. They typically achieve this by building greener offices, reducing employee air travels, or other ways of offsetting carbon such as planting trees and seagrasses.However, many companies often aren't concerned with carbon emissions coming from the personal day to day activities of their employees, which aren't typically accounted towards the carbon neutrality numbers of the organizations themselves. The ESG teams at PwC chose to create an application to take on this task.

The solution

When I am given the goal to build a product that raises the environmental awareness of employees, the big question becomes: if participation isn't necessary, how can I make it engaging enough for people to want to try it out?For me, gamification is a compelling answer to that question. The project has to be exciting enough for the users to enjoy learning about their own environmental impact. And it would be a bonus factor if they are willing to share amongst each other.After researching, browsing through various products made by NGOs such as WWF and other companies, a carbon calculator application fits the criteria nicely. I determined that the UI has to be fun and should be different from other types of internal applications to avoid too much visual association. I chose to pitch the idea along with a medium definition UI, and included as many ideas as possible to engage in client brainstorming. The clients quickly greenlit the idea and we went to execution.Throughout the process, I worked extensively with the ESG team to come up with the most fitting questions, and crunched the numbers so that each question can generate a quantifiable result. We also divided the quiz into 3 sections: food, lifestyle, and transportation. The users would be able to understand which aspect of their life is leading to the most carbon emissions. Finally, we are able to display the results into its carbon equivalents (e.g. # of trees needed to absorb) so that the data can be meaningful.We are able to engage with nearly 3000 employees to estimate their personal carbon emissions. With its pledgemaking feature, 1800 tons of carbon emissions were promised to be reduced by the employees voluntarily.

The background

During the COVID pandemic, unprecedented disruptions were brought to the way we work in the form of lockdowns and other social restrictions. For China, its impact was tenfold. Eventually, companies were all asking one question: What is the future of work going to look like?It took some time for companies that aren't already remote first to adjust, but a policy shift towards incorporating certain levels of remote work/WFH seemed inevitable. It is during this time we began experimenting with the concept of building a social media product that connects those who are willing to work remotely, and those who are looking for talents regardless of their locations. We took inspirations from the models of two major products: Clubhouse had a novel social media model, and Fiverr had an established and successful gig economy model. Toctou was Designed to be an intersection of the two, aimed towards the post-pandemic Chinese market of software developers, which had few products in the same vertical at the time. I led the product as its product manager, responsible for its market research, wireframing, logo and brand identity design, feature definition and backlogging, eventually launching its iOS/Android app in 5 months.The name Toctou came from the race condition bug TOCTOU (time-of-check to time-of-use), and its Chinese name a homophonic translation (“钛客”), also has a tech related linguistics connotation. I designed its logo after the commonly used double slash (//) in code, indicating a comment. At the same time, "comments" are also the building block of a social media platform. Multiple sketches of the logo were first created in Procreate, and its vector version finalized in Adobe Illustrator.