The Company
Humanize is a personalized company social platform used for connecting disparate employees over their lesser known interests.
The Problem
51% of Americans feel disconnected from their jobs due to inadequate relationships, lack of motivation, and under appreciation by management (CBS).
The Goal
Creating a storytelling + connectivity platform for employees to learn about their peers, filter through mutual interests, build relationships, and render their bigger company smaller.
My Role: Principal UX Designer, UX Researcher
Team: Michael Forde-Smith, Rosie Goldwasser, Keying Sun, Dani Tuchman
Duration: 14 weeks
Design Process
Converge and diverge, Iterating, Figma, Storyboarding, Interaction Design, Wireframe
Research Methods
User interviews, User persona, User epics,
User features, Competitive analysis,
Prototype testing, Information architecture
1
Laying the Groundwork
My Original Pitch to Teams
For this class, I’m proposing an application version of the exhibition style Humanize I’ve now produced for several companies. This application will serve as a story-network--a tool that employees can reference during on-boarding, team interventions, and their spare time. Unlike the book version, coworkers can browse their peers’ stories, comment on them, and get in touch with their peers directly through the application. There will also be a filter option for stories; for example if people are trying to start a flag-football league, they can browse stories relating to sports and find potential players. I hope to keep the application simple to allow for the stories to breath the most life into the product.
2
User persona creation
Forming a Story
In order to gain a better understand of our user-base prior to user testing, we constructed three primary Personas. Even if these personas “failed” at the task, we had a representation of our problem and were able to go back and solve it. These personas allowed us to test designs before they were fully developed and to isolate problems so they can be overcome.
Rose Gold
Example of a Senior Manager who wants her team to work better together, increase productivity and build meaningful relationships.
3
User testing
Testing our Personas and VVP
After holding three round table discussions with various users, we collected these three main takeaways before moving onto storyboarding and wireframing.
1.
Users want to know how they can incentivize themselves to approach employees online whom they've never met.
2.
Users want to know if this product is targeted at management or the well-being of all employees. Make goal clear.
2.
Instead of solely having short employee narratives, there should be events advertised for people with mutual interests to attend together.
4
Scenario + Storyboarding
Iterating a solution
After listening to the needs and wants of our users, we designed a more-fleshed out user scenario for Rose Gold. These scenarios demonstrate how Humanize will be of great value to both of them.
To better visual Rose Gold's story, we supplemented it with the following storyboard:
5
Sight Map Creation
Iterating a solution
By creating personas, scenarios, and a storyboard, we visualized a mock-application layout as a team. Together, we created a basic site map to demonstrate how some of our functions would be laid out.
6
Prototype
The design
Our goal with the design was to make everything easily accessible. All of the screens can be reached using the bottom navigation. The UI is bright, colorful, and humane--the key to extending our Humanize messaging properly.
7
Reflection
Even though this was my first introduction to a UI/UX project, this project offered a successful solution to a rapidly growing problem. I'd like to continue to grow this product out and personalize it more thoroughly for each company. I believe that large companies everywhere can greatly benefit from this application. I am very pleased with the overall process and production of our application.