Virtual Dialogue Web Platform
Root Inc.
The Virtual Dialogue Web Platform allows teams to synchronously explore and discover content to support organizational change initiatives in an engaging, digital experience.
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How do you get five, 900, or 10,000 people to collaborate remotely during COVID?
Historically, Root facilitated in-person workshops using hands-on solutions like a Root Learning Map® experience to help their clients manage strategic change initiatives. As time went on, Root recognized that many companies were migrating to remote or hybrid work environments and created a digital experience to liberate them from unengaging video meetings.
With their clients moving to a work-from-home model, Root needed a more robust platform.
While virtual meeting platforms exist, Root aimed to provide users with an opportunity for two-way conversation, to engage with multiple perspectives, and to deep dive into their organization’s strategy, financials, or processes.They wanted to create something similar to a whiteboard, where everyone’s voice could be heard in a fun, engaging, and meaningful way.
Goals
- Transition from a static to a dynamic virtual experience that matches the energy of the Root Learning Map® experience
- Create opportunity for organizations to have a stellar virtual experience for employees/stakeholders in these important discussions
Nate Butki, Vice President
Coordinating Stakeholders
Process
Atomic started the engagement with a remote kickoff. This included journey mapping, goal setting, and feature prioritization with Root stakeholders. By creating this web app, Root was building a critical digital footprint. This would enable them to augment organizational change capabilities and deliver increased value to clients who operate in a virtual, remote, or hybrid set-up.
The design and development happened simultaneously, with the delivery lead driving the product-thinking approach. As the design team delivered a new feature, the development team would consider the best way to implement it, informing the designs if needed.
This bootstrapping approach allowed the Atomic team to be agile and focus on the long-term product, setting up the Root team to find success once the project was over.
Technical Specs
Atomic designed the system architecture and wrote software and firmware for:
The delivery lead asked questions around the long-term life of the application:
- What is the right thing to build now?
- How do we decide the best thing to build?
Building a client lifecycle mindset ensures that an application is valuable, usable, feasible, and viable. This is crucial to ensure that the solutions implemented by the development and design teams work in the real world.
The design team focused on user experience and feature build-out, asking questions like:
- How will a user interact with this tool?
- Will they understand this workflow?
- What are the sticking points?
These questions helped the Atomic team and Root prioritize the set of activities that would be offered to the users to get a holistic idea of how users would interact with the platform.
The development team focused on building out the digital map such that multiple users could interact with the tool at the same time.
This involved creating features like:
- Cursor tracking: users can see other participants cursor movements as they navigate the activities
- Live questions: users can type in answers and see the answers of their teammates in real-time
- Drag & drop sorting: users can interact with blocks and see other users interacting
Bella Olszewski, Atomic Consultant & Designer
Results
Participants have complete control of the experience without needing trained facilitators
Demos of the capabilities to clients have been successful, with every client wanting to learn more
Under the Hood
Atomic customized an off-the-shelf CMS solution. This allowed Root to create content for the Root Virtual Dialogue Application, enabling the team to focus effort on the real-time synchronization engine.
The web app offers a virtual Root Learning Map® experience that users can navigate on their own. Using the open-source framework SocketIO as a foundation, Atomic built a synchronization engine to let users work together, with all interactions and cursor movements reflected on participants' screens in real-time.
Long-term, it provides significant flexibility, enabling Root to offer a variety of dialogue-driven capabilities to clients, in addition to the virtual Root Learning Map ® experiences.
Nate Butki, Vice President
Coordinating Stakeholders
A Partnership with a Storybook Ending
The team’s careful project management, client communication, cutting-edge architecture, and cohesive design strategy helped the team ship the product on time and on budget.
Reflecting back on the multi-year, high-profile project, Robinson said Atomic helped his company arrive at a special moment in time.
“We'd never done anything this big. Ever,” he said. “We’re live across all the major pillars Atomic said they would deliver on. It was delivered on time, on budget, to expectation, live. Not three or four milestones late with people leaving and the platform half-baked and full of bugs.”
StoryLoom began open-beta in December 2022. A global launch is scheduled for the spring of 2023.
“We’ve been given a rare opportunity," said Robinson, "to find success by chasing opportunities Starship Enterprise-style: going where people aren’t—pushing boundaries.”