Calm HipChat: A New Design of the Chat Tool for Teams

The growth of group chat tools fills the gap where email is lacking the ability to make communications instant and direct. HipChat is a market-leading chat tool by Atlassian and the employees at Atlassian rely heavily on HipChat to get their work done. To make HipChat fit better into people's workflows, I conducted observations, interviews, and online survey internally among the Atlassian employees. The research mainly focused on the context of HipChat usage which includes window arrangement and task management. Among the several interesting insights I gained from the research, the most important one is that HipChat is bringing too much information to people at work that they lose the balance between being informed and being focused. So I generated the idea of a calm design: the feature allows people to prioritize their work and save things for later; it helps people keep the memory of less frequent contacts with ease; it cleans the valuable space on name lists for better access to certain people. I made a high-fidelity prototype to demonstrate this idea and tested it among people inside and outside of the company. It was proved to be a highly executable solution to the problems.