RWS Tech needed help with their internal web app that helps new employees find mentorship from senior-level employees. I led a 2-week sprint design that redesigned the application’s dashboard.
In the middle of my internship, I was tasked with leading a 2-week sprint to redesign a major portion of this enterprise app that helps employees find or offer mentorship.
The app was in the midst of a major design overhaul and this particular challenge involved having to bridge parts of the app that were not redesigned with the new direction that the redesign was heading towards.
Analytics was showing that users who completed the registration workflow were not making mentoring connections or joining virtual mentoring engagements nearly at the level the company wanted. This meant that there was a lot of confusion and lack of engagement on this page. Adding another dimension to this challenge, the company looked to me to introduce and demonstrate the value of user research, which until this point was not very supported as part of the engineering process.
This was a greenfield project in that the Product Owner really wanted us to push them and see where we can go with it.
RWS Tech had three very specific goals that they set for this redesign:
We had three types of users
Ideally, I would like to target one type of users, but realistically, I had to balance the needs of new and existing users and I had to deliver something that bridged their respective needs simultaneously.
First, my process is to do a thorough audit of the existing app and when I do that I want to identify problems from a visual design perspective and usability perspective. What I immediately look for are inconsistencies and points of confusion.
I familiarize myself with the existing interface. It was missing direction, it didn’t explain or tell the users how to navigate the app; it also lacked both visual identity and value. Because of these key elements, the app had low connections and the engagement they desired was low. In order to decide what features to highlight, we released a survey and held a couple of user interviews. The survey would help us get a general idea of what users wanted to see on the app.
What stood out more than anything was that there was very little value offered to the users. If users wanted some information to begin navigating the app, they had to click away to find that.
Here is a picture of the navigation. It’s dated, there is a lot of information that is not relevant to the user. it is also unclear, do users know what to click on to get to the engagement and start using it?
Taking a step back, I saw opportunities to remove a lot of the noise, add high value features, such as adding their goals and badges earned to keep them motivated and engaged, introducing the ability for people to connect with each other instead of having them connect via topics. I also saw the opportunity to add some visual identity and a modern sense to it with modern elements
Because we only had 2 weeks to go from research to high fidelity design, I needed to rely on research tools that would be quick. Because I was just an intern, I didn't get permission to talk to existing clients, so I found people within my existing network that were similar to the users we were targeting.
We learned that users wanted a way to clearly communicate with their mentors and have easy access to their conversations. They expressed that this would allow them to check if they had any upcoming meetings, or simply check their previous conversations for any goals or upcoming tasks.
Users also wanted help staying motivated with using the app because they can essentially get the information they need from various sources; usually, in the past, mentors usually are inconsistent, thus users would also feel unmotivated to login and check the app.
Engineering team was super responsive, they loved that I thought about componentization, they loved the fact that I really took a lot of the feedback and ideas that everyday had throughout the company and incorporated it into a cohesive design; the simplicity and feasibility of the design was also highly praised because it was component friendly.
Some things that came up that were questioned was the badges and company wide badges, that seemed redundant and a little bit confusing; and if it confused the engineering team, it is a safe assumption that it was going to confuse the users.
While our research showed that users would really resonate with people-oriented engagement recommendations versus a topic, the system had the functionality and people did like the topics. So rather than immediately write off the edge case of the topical base, we thought there would be a way to incorporate both and allow them to decide how they wanted to engage.