Join Scenarios
Enabling architects, contractors, and owners to experiment and collaborate before starting a new construction project.
I am a design advisor with Join, a collaboration-obsessed product to help construction teams make decisions. One of my projects was leading the design of a new product feature called Scenarios. Scenarios enable multi-disciplinary construction teams to bring ideas to the table, price them out, and decide which ideas will make it into the project.
Impact
User
20%
20% of Scenarios users are architects and other design team members—a brand new target audience.
Product
4 days to 2 days
Average decision-making timing from creating scenarios went from 4 days to 2 days.
People and Process
Ownership
Implemented a user-centered research process to get product feedback before starting development.
Took on product ownership in lieu of a product manager for this feature.
Problem
Construction at any scale comes with trade-offs. Owners, contractors, trades, and architects must come together to plan, define, and deliver a project that meets the customer’s needs—all within a budget and timeline.
This decision-making process often involves collecting ideas and alternatives and combining them into a few plans to review, discuss, and decide on. For example, a team can save money by using double-paned glass instead of triple-paned, or they can choose more affordable building materials to save money elsewhere.
Historically, construction teams have used Excel to keep track of and present scenarios. This presents a problem as Excel is not natively collaborative, file versions are easily mixed up when sent as an attachment, and Excel requires extensive setup to run scenario analyses rather than being a purpose-built tool.
Solution
Join’s Scenarios feature is a collaborative tool for construction teams to explore potential paths forward and present sets of decisions for approval by owners.
Scenario creation
Project teams can quickly build scenarios through simple drag and drop.
Evaluating and comparing scenarios
The net impact of a scenario is presented by the Scenario Changes along with the new Accepted Changes value and Projected Running Total.
These can be compared to the Current Base Milestone and other Scenarios.
Presenting scenarios
When ready to present, the presentation mode makes it easy to summarize the decisions that need to be made for easy comparison.
Applying scenarios
After evaluating a scenario, the user can apply it to enable the project team to start working off of the decisions made.
Iteration
Relationships of entities
Early on, it was critical to understand the relationships between scenarios, ideas (called “items”), options, and the comparison itself. Creating diagrams and capturing assumptions helped the product development team ensure we were on the same page.
Sets of scenarios
An early concept envisioned us having multiple scenarios at any given time. After some user-centered research, we discovered that most construction teams deal with an individual decision at any given time. We decided to simplify our approach and enable a single scenario comparison per project milestone to reduce complexity.
Qualitative feedback
“...it’s almost like to me that’s the happy meal right there. The scenario function—it really grabs you. The ability to do scenarios quickly, you know, without having to go away and come back in two weeks with a different version. That you can almost do live, to a certain extent.”
“Once again, JOIN hits a home run!! … [we] used Scenarios with one of our Clients this week and the feedback was GREAT!! Everyone enjoyed the process as well as the live option creation to make decisions”
“This is so perfect. We have an interview next week for a 150M job and need to pull low medium high options. I used scenarios and it’s awesome. Perfect timing!”
“Man, that sandbox graphic for scenarios is too cute”