Organisational visibility on the move
Extending organisational visibility beyond the desktop — enabling anytime, anywhere access as part of Woolworths’ digital transformation.
Role
UX Designer
Client
Woolworths
TeamView is a web-native desktop application developed to give Woolworths employees better visibility and clarity across the organisation. Originally designed for desktop use, the product featured complex UI patterns and interactions that, while powerful, were not optimised for smaller screens or touch-based input.
As part of Woolworths’ broader digital transformation strategy, a decision was made to extend TeamView’s functionality to mobile. While there was no explicit business problem driving the need for a mobile version, the move was seen as a proactive step towards modernising the digital ecosystem, supporting greater accessibility, and future-proofing the platform for an increasingly mobile-enabled workforce.
the Background
The challenge
The mobile extension of TeamView was driven by a strategic desire to showcase digital transformation efforts, though it lacked a clearly defined user problem at the outset. This created an opportunity to ground the experience in actual user needs through early testing and design exploration.
How might we identify and prioritize real user needs to guide the design of the TeamView mobile extension?
Our goals
Identify and prioritise high-value functionality
Rather than attempting to replicate the full desktop experience, we focused on distilling TeamView’s core utility into the few tasks that would matter most on mobile. This meant prioritising speed, simplicity and access to essential information.
Lay a scalable foundation for future growth
The first iteration of TeamView Mobile wasn’t intended to be feature-complete. Instead, we focused on creating a lightweight, adaptable framework that could evolve over time, allowing future teams to build on a strong, validated base.
Support seamless integration into existing workflows
We aimed to design a mobile experience that felt additive, not disruptive. The goal was to ensure that TeamView Mobile complemented daily routines rather than competing with them, increasing the likelihood of adoption and sustained use.
the Approach
Narrowing down the primary function and use cases for TeamView desktop was critical to developing the mobile adaptation. We did this in a few ways:
Illuminating our assumptions with real insights
Gaining a clear understanding of business goals, drivers and blockers, as well as technical constraints was important to be able to understand how we could develop an effective mobile adaptation for the TeamView platform. We conducted multiple stakeholder workshops and questionnaires with the purpose of answering some critical questions:
• Where are users currently finding the most utility and value with the current TeamView product?
• If TeamView mobile were to sacrifice functional utility for the mobile adaptation, how else could the mobile product add value for Team Members?
• How can team team members seamlessly incorporate the TeamView product without major disruptions to their established workflow tools i.e Google chat, groups, Teams etc.
Maximising design efficiency
Clarifying the product constraints early allowed us to maximise our time for design and documentation at the end of the sprint - a critical phase pre-handover.
As this was a mobile web application, and not a standalone app, we were able to make a few considerations and concessions from the beginning:
• Focus on leveraging current user behaviour to maximise functionality of the mobile web app. This meant prioritising and enhancing current high-value feature sets such as Search and Profile, and placing lower priority on Groups and Network features.
• A limited timeframe meant that we needed to leverage the current design language as much as possible, rather than building mobile assets from scratch. We created a simple design system that relied more on the mindful use of colour and typography as opposed to complex interactions and transitions.
• We decided to keep the design as simple as possible in order to maximise the time spent on documentation. This tactic proved to be invaluable as a shorter design development time allowed us to be concise and detailed when it came to project handover.
Key insights
Complement, not compete
Our early research indicated that users were not seeking additional features or functionality on mobile - they valued speed, simplicity and focus in their workflows.
Rather than replicate the desktop experience, our approach of providing a pared-back version which emphasised core tasks that allowed them to find people quickly, view profiles and highlight organisational information proved to be the right one.
Feature overlap
Users noted a lack of feature clarity and were confused by the ‘Groups’ and ‘Save’ features, noting that existing platforms such as Slack and Google already serve similar functions.
This prompted a re-evaluation of feature positioning and purpose, with recommendations to either differentiate these features more clearly or explore integrations with existing tools to align with users’ established workflows.
Usability Gaps in Key Tasks
Despite a clean and intuitive UI, critical tasks showed low success rates and high misclicks, highlighting a need to improve flow clarity, visual cues, and alignment with users’ mental models and expectations.
This led to early discussions around implementing onboarding screens or instructional UI overlays to support task completion — though further testing was not conducted before project handover.
the outcome
• Overall, the project underscored the importance of aligning new digital tools with users’ existing workflows, reinforcing that successful adoption hinges not on offering more features, but on delivering targeted, intuitive value.
• Early usability test results informed a recommendation to potentially reframe or consolidate features to avoid redundancy and increase perceived value, ensuring the product fills a gap rather that replicate or replace existing behaviours.
• Talks of incorporating onboarding or instructional overlays emerged as a potential solution, but were not validated due to handover timing.