Project Overview
Incrementum was proposed for our client, People Psyence®, from the previous team. They aim to develop a digital career pathing solution that helps employees visualise their career pathways and achieve their goals.
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The prototype was developed before the start of our project. Therefore, our team's goal is to help improve the web flow by developing solutions for the client.
Duration
January 2023 - March 2023
(8 Weeks)
People
Team project: Rachel (me),
Xiu Hui, and Aparna
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Client: People Psyence®
Skills
Heuristic Evaluation,
User Research, Prototyping, User Testing
Tools
Pencil and paper, whiteboard and Figma
Problem
Our team has decided to conduct a heuristic evaluation on a previous prototype to see if there is room for usability improvement.
We also conducted user interviews to discover their encounters with using any digital career pathing, their career plan and usability testing for the existing prototype made by the previous team. Insights from our User research revealed that users are aware of their career plans but it’s lacking guidance on job requirements for advancement within their company.
For the existing prototype, we will need to find a way to streamline the user flow better to improve user experience.
Solution
Our team has decided to redesign the digital career website so that users can know how to use the product and reduce the cognitive load when processing the information needed on the website.
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Critical features of Incrementum include:
Revamped Dashboard
The new dashboard offers an intuitive and user-friendly interface that enables employees to explore and set their career paths and set new targets for their daily goals.
Skills & Traits Matching
Employees can explore their career paths based on their skills and traits. This will help them decide whether they want to cross over to a different department in the organisation.
Traced Career Path
The feature allows the employees to use a tracing career path. This will help them to find out how far they will go if they continue to pursue their current role. Furthermore, they also can trace other people's career paths.
Gamification Element
The feature allows employees to send positive affirmations to their colleagues. It involves a leaderboard to encourage user engagement and improve relationships in the company.
Process
Our team has decided to conduct a heuristic evaluation on a previous prototype to see if there is room for usability improvement.
We also conducted user interviews to discover their encounters with using any digital career pathing, their career plan and usability testing for the existing prototype made by the previous team.
Insights from our User research revealed that users are aware of their career plans but it’s lacking guidance on job requirements for advancement within their company. For the existing prototype, we will need to find a way to streamline the user flow better to improve user experience.
Competitive Analysis
Our team has conducted a competitive analysis by finding out the strength, weaknesses and feature analyses of other digital careers pathing platforms.
Competitive Analysis Findings
OPPORTUNITY #1
Gamification Elements
The competitors of Incrementum do not have gamification elements in the platform. This is an excellent opportunity to explore the type of gamification elements to implement for our users.
OPPORTUNITY #2
Feedback from mentor/line manager
We discovered that incrementum is lacking feedback loop. This feature is essential because employees want to know what they need to work on their weaknesses. This is an opportunity for us to implement this feature for our users.
User Research
To streamline the user flow better, we first need to understand the motivations and behaviours behind someone using a digital career pathing platform. Each of us has conducted three user interviews.
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The objective of the user interview:
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If the employees have a career plan
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To understand what the employees want from a career pathing application, what are their priorities and needs
Findings from the User Interviews
INTERVIEW INSIGHT #1
Employees have a career plan
Employees mentioned knowing what steps to take for their career plan regarding required skillsets and experiences. Some of them have their manager to be involved with their career progression.
INTERVIEW INSIGHT #2
Employees want to know how other people plan for their career
A few of the employees mentioned that they are interested in learning from others about career planning as they want to gain a broader perspective from other people so that they can plan their own career progression better.
INTERVIEW INSIGHT #3
Employees want to understand themselves
and their colleagues better
Employees want to assess their own strengths and weaknesses to improve their hard and soft skills and learn about the working styles of their team members.
INTERVIEW INSIGHT #4
Employees feel that gamification should not promote
toxic competition
Employees are open to having a gamification element as a way to motivate and engage in their work. However, they had expressed concern that it might create a toxic environment in their workplace.
Building Empathy
With the findings that we have and from the previous team, we defined two target group profiles, Theo—a 25-year-old newly employed UX Designer (from the previous team) and Angela—a 29-year-old Senior Marketer to better empathise with our main user groups and prioritise goals according to their needs.
Ideation
This involved translating all our findings by exploring various solutions through sketching using the crazy eight method on the post-it notes.
Userflow
Next, we drew a user flow for Theo and Angela while placing our ideation features on the whiteboard to see which features are suitable for each part of the flow for both Theo and Angela.
Wireframe
Afterwards, we proceed to do lo-fi wireframing on pencil and paper.
High-fidelity Prototyping
Once we finalised the wireframes, we produced a high-fidelity prototype. We used Figma to create its flow and the interaction
User Testing
With the high-fidelity prototype, we conducted usability testing on five participants. The objective is to test the usability and usefulness of our prototype.
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We asked the participants to perform a series of tasks while playing the role of Theo, a new hire at the company. During the usability tests, participants were asked to voice their thoughts and seek help whenever they faced difficulties.
After the usability tests, more questions were asked to probe users' emotions when using Incrementum and to address any confusion.
User Testing Results
Users can complete most tasks but express frustrations as there are no tutorials for first-time users.
USER TESTING RESULT #1
Participants find the language confusing
When trying out the high-fidelity prototype, they found the words 'Milestones' and 'Daily Goal' confusing. Some participants associate the word 'Milestones' with achieving small goals instead of adding their desired career path.
USER TESTING RESULT #2
Participants spent a few minutes trying to explore Incrementum and found it frustrating to use as a first-time user
Participants who were first-time users of Incrementum experienced frustration while trying to explore the platform. Despite spending a few minutes navigating the platform, they encountered obstacles that made it difficult to use.
USER TESTING RESULT #3
Participants do not understand the true purpose of the leaderboard and sending cheers to their colleagues
Participants did not fully understand the purpose of the leaderboard and sending cheers to their colleagues. Despite being able to see the score, they do not find it significant of these scores and how they helped them to improve the team dynamics.
USER TESTING RESULT #4
Participants find that some interactions are unclear to users, and they do not know they can click on some buttons
Some of the participants encountered difficulties with the interactions on the platform. They were unsure how to interact with certain elements and buttons and were unaware that some buttons were clickable.
Iterations
Based on the user testing results, we made a few adjustments to improve the final prototype for Incrementum.
ITERATION #1
Onboarding for first-time users
This is an additional feature for first-time users when logging in to reduce frustrations.
ITERATION #2
Changing of the words
Change of “Milestone” to “Create career path” and “Daily Goals” to “Daily Targets” to reduce confusion to the users.
Before
After
ITERATION #3
A notification to receive cheers from colleagues
Demonstrate the purpose of sending cheers and leaderboards by placing the cheers button on the navigation bar and letting users know its meaning.
Before
After
ITERATION #4
Usability Issue
Resolve usability issues by directing the user’s attention to an action trigger.
Before
After
Reflection
I'm happy the client was impressed by our deliverables because we exceeded their expectations.
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One of the most significant challenges was widening our project scope after the client had rejected our initial solution during the first check-in meeting and wanted us to focus more on the career path feature.
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This experience has taught my team members and myself to think out of the box when there's an abrupt situation change.
