Role: Sr. UX Designer, I researched, co-facilitated the design sprint, designed the PoC, and oversaw design execution by an agency
Co-facilitator: Anand V - Director IT
Website Owners: Brain Chapman, Susan Gross
C Suite Stakeholders: Krishina Mikkilineni, Mike Bennet
Areas: Employee experience ; Responsive design ; Search; Chat
Employees did not like to use the employee portal. Drop-offs rate had spiked from 76% to 89% . The lack of support for mobile and poor findability were key issues. Through a Design Sprint with 25 participants, we created a Proof of Concept to build a Point of view for leadership before choosing a SaaS.
Freshers & veteran employees
Enterprise services representatives & SMEs
Moderators an IT Director, and myself the Sr. UX designer
50 employees to test the prototype
Employees couldn't find what they were looking for like Travel, Leave, Approvals, Payslips, IT Support, etc,. Veterans bookmarked important links.
Marcom and other teams pushed irrelevant news.
No mobile support, so besides dedicated apps like Microsoft outlook, Skype, and concur the Bring Your Own Device program wasn't successful.
Self Serve tools didn't exist leading to a high number of tickets. Employee couldn't remember which tool to visit to make a request. Service admins maintained and trained on too many tools and wished that everything worked on Sharepoint.
Anand and I rotated across teams to ensure ideas aren't ignored at this stage. I also helped the teams sketch out their ideas into something visually comprehensible enough to be presented and discussed.
Dot voting & Speedboat helped identify what's popular vs impactful
I created a prototype showcasing how the design principles could
potentially impact existing content of the Intranet.
Surface cards in context of individual users, in relation to other users, services, and status. To Do's, Quick Views, and Pre-filled messages. For eg.
• A card that highlights approvals across services
• Pre-filled standardised but editable messages (eg Goal Submission reminders)
• Chart & Stats of interest like Agile metrics
• Upcoming events that directly connects to forms to registration forms.
• Travel cards that acts as a quick reference.
• Article cards for editorials stories rather than press releases. They must be in the domain or important enough to for the user to know to go across verticals.
Instead users trying to figure out which support team to reach out to, they will be able to use a single support interface.
An NLP chatbot would resolve minor issues and provide walkthrough videos for self-help. Complex problems would transfer to an agent of the respective service team but remain in the same chat.
Not only will you have access to your recent search history, you will be able to access popular searches based on the location you work at or period of year.
Apps can be launched or downloaded from search.
Auto-categorised into dynamic tabs once you enter text.
The cards on the home page could be filtered and configured as per users preferences.
Pages that weren't going to be coded into cards could still be favourited and appear in the Favourites page.
Chat support for any and all problems was accessible from the header as well.
We did 5 interviews each across 5 locations globally to prevent any cultural biases. I coordinated this effort with Honeywell's UX community before hand.
The feedback was positive, except for concerns of feasiblity.
By 8:30pm IST I had summed up everything in a presentation. Anand presented it to the leadership and got their approval.
The Design Sprint was a success.
Selection of the SaaS would keep our PoC as the North star.
Service Now's UI framework wasn't that flexible so the cards had to be redesigned. I oversaw the agency that created the style-guide.
Sharepoint framework did not support the PoC's Search features.
No effort was made in categorising the remaining links of the intranet. It was dumped in the Hamburger menu as an endless list.
Design Sprints are not meant to rethink ecosystems. They are better used to make minor enhancement to a product or the first 5 steps in the right direction of a marathon.
I am certain that given the time and resources we would have better categorised and created several contextual and actionable cards that would have been a source of delight to employees.
