Incrementum

PROJECT OVERVIEW

According to LinkedIn's 2019 Workforce Learning Report, 94 percent of employees say that they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development. With this insight, our client People Psyence®, wants to develop a digital career pathing solution that help employees visualize their career pathway and allow employers to help them to achieve their career goals.

As they already develop a prototype before the start of our project, our team took on the project with the goal of iteration and providing an improved solution for our client. For this project, I took up the role as an UX researcher and UI designer.

People:
RAX
‍Xiuhui (Me!)
Rachel
Aparna

Skills:
‍Heuristic evaluation,
User research,
Prototyping,
Usability test

Duration:
‍6 weeks
( Mid Jan - Feb 2023)

ABOUT PEOPLE PSYENCE®

People Psyence® originated from their intrigue for ‘people-watching’ and the desire to learn exactly what makes a person ‘tick’. They started off with conducting psychometric assessments for employees and also diversified into design thinking and gamification over the years. To further empower employees, they now seek to develop a digital career pathing solution with their expertise.

THE PROBLEM

As the client already has an existing prototype, our team decided to conduct a heuristic evaluation first to identify areas for improvement in usability. We also conducted user interviews to probe further about their experiences with career pathing website, their thoughts about career planning and also usability test for the existing prototype.

Insights from our user research revealed that users are aware of their career plans, but it’s lacking of guidance on job requirements for advancement within their company. There is also a lack of resources that allow employees to explore the career paths that they can take.

For the existing prototype, the user flow can be better streamline to improve user experience.

Heuristic evaluation of the pre-existing Incrementum prototype

THE SOLUTION

To streamline the user flow, our team decided to revamp the dashboard so that users will be more aware of the steps to take for their career pathing and to reduce cognitive load.

Revamped Dashboard:

New features added:

1a. Explore Career Paths
Skills & Traits matching
Empower employees to make decisions regarding their own career paths
This feature helps user to match their skills and traits with other positions in the organization.

1b. Explore Career Paths
Trace career paths
Learn from other people's career path and envision their own
This feature allows users to explore the possible career paths that they can take in their organization.

2. Gamification for sending positive affirmations
Working from home reduce interactions with colleagues and engagement with organization
‍By gamifying and adding a leaderboard to sending cheers to other colleagues, it can potentially increase engagement and improve relationship in the workplace.

Design Process

The design process was based on the Double Diamond theory, including the key phases of discovery, definition, development, and delivery.

As there was already an existing prototype, we started with heuristic evaluation and usability test of the prototype before continuing to the discovery stage.

User Research

Discovering what is the problem

We conducted 9 user interviews to understand the users' experiences of using career pathing website, and also to understand their attitude towards career planning and their priorities. We also conducted usability testing with our users using the existing prototype to get some insights on its usability.

Some of the main insights gathered were:‍‍

"The aesthetic is nice and clean. But I think there’s too much going on in the dashboard and not sure what the focus of the page is about."

"I think the website can help me in my career progress as there are useful resources like the kind of courses I need and also the mentors that I can seek advices from"

"I let my manager know that I wanted to try something different from the current role but my manager did not do anything."

Competitive Analysis

Discovering what is the problem

Product features competitive analysis was done to compare the features of current career pathing solutions with Incrementum to evaluate whether there are any unique selling points (USPs) of Incrementum in order to compete in the market.

Analysis showed that Incrementum is the most similar to Accendo and can differentiate itself with its organization viewing feature. In consideration of People Psyence's expertise on gamification, gamification elements can potentially be added to Incrementum as its USP.

Personas

Defining and prioritizing the problem with the most impact

We decided to keep the primary persona, Theo, that was used for developing the initial prototype of Incrementum. However, with our results from the user interviews, we came out with a secondary persona for Incrementum. Due to time constraints, our team communicated with the client and decided to focus solely on the employees as our users for this project.

The personas are :

Theo, who recently just graduated and new to the workforce
Angela, who already has several years of working experience and looking for career progression

Angela needs a career progression plan that motivate and inform her of what she needs to advance and achieve her career aspirations as currently there is a lack of transparency of the job requirements for the job positions within the company.

HMW help Theo to explore his career path?
HMW help Theo to know what skills he’s lacking so thathe knows how to progress to his career milestone?
HMW help Theo feel more engaged at his organization?

HMW provide Angela with the necessary information and guidance on job requirements for advancement within the company?
HMW help Angela to develop her career progression plan that effectively motivates and guides her towards achieving her career aspirations?

‍Theo needs a way to discover and work towards his career goals, which will help him feel more engaged with his organization.

Design feature #1
Career Roadmap

Developing solutions to solve the problems

This feature helps user to plan and visualize their career roadmap in simple and elegant manner. User can define & track their aspirations and get skills recommendations for the desired role.

Design feature #2
Skills Development

Developing solutions to solve the problems

Users can view their skills that are lacking in and explore recommended courses for their skills development based on their current & desired role. They can also explore other courses based on their interest

Design feature #3
Explore Career Path

Developing solutions to solve the problems

This feature helps user to match their skills with other positions in the organization. It provides them clear understanding of their skills and traits mapping with the other positions in the organization. This gives user guidance on choosing next career path in the organization.

The Trace Career Path option also allows employees to see other employees' career path and to envision their own career path using the organization chart.
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Design feature #4
Leaderboard

Developing solutions to solve the problems

Having a leaderboard help to encourage users to give and receive cheers within the organization. Employees will feel acknowledged by receiving positive affirmation and be more motivated in their work.

Usability Test

Developing the prototype and testing its functionality with users

We conducted usability tests with 5 participants with the objective of identifying usability problems and areas for improvement.

Main insights gathered:

The words that are confusing to users: ‘Milestone’, ‘Daily Goal’
Users spent a few minutes trying to explore Incrementum and found it frustrating to use as a first time user.
Users do not understand the true purpose of the leaderboard and sending cheers to their colleagues
Usability issues - Some interactions are not very clear to users and they do not know they can click on some of the buttons

New Onboarding Tutorial
Addition of an onboarding tutorial for first time users upon logging in to reduce frustrations for first-time users

Before
"Milestone" and "Daily goals" were used and caused confusion for our users.

After
Replaced “Milestone” with “Create career path” and “Daily Goals” with “Daily Targets”

Leaderboard and sending cheers
Demonstrate the purpose of sending cheers and leaderboard by placing the cheers button on the navigation bar and allow users to know its purpose

Before
Usability issue- Not clear that the overlay is connected to desired job #1

After
Iterate the design to make the connection more obvious

Reflection

What went well and what can be improved

I am very happy that during our presentation of the final prototype, our client expressed their satisfaction with our deliverables.

For me, the greatest difficulty for this project would be justifying the design decisions and changes made to the initial prototype. As the website is yet to be launched in the market, there was no real data to convince our client, and we had to articulate our design decisions based on our user interviews and heuristic evaluations.

This experience had definitely improved my skills on "winning" the client over and making them support our design decisions.
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INCREMENTUM

Revamped Dashboard:

New features added:

Process Overview