With the use of different communication channels such as emails, messaging groups, WhatsApp, and others, the Company faced challenges in ensuring that all relevant information is consistently accessed by all employees.

Context

Challenge

GOAL: To design a solution that settle the lack of centralization and difficulty in effectively disseminating important information/news.

Design Process

Lessons

• Better Analytics: We are missing good tools to gather helpful data. We need this data to understand how people use our system and what they like. If we improve our analytics, we can make smarter decisions and make our system work better for everyone.

• Improving Alerts/Push Notifications: Our alerts and notifications are not working as well as we would like. To fix this, we asked users for feedback to understand what's went wrong.

Main lesson: If we had better tools to track this and improve our analytics, we could figure out the issues more easily and we can make smarter decisions and make our system work better for everyone.

Timeframe

My Role

Apr to Jun 2023

UI/UX Design

Costumer

Deal Technologies

Core Team

1 Product Manager

1 Product Designer

1 UI/UX Design

Would you like to see more details?

• Enhance the data sources;

• Enhance and include new metrics, like Churn Rate, Error Rate, Time Spent on Platform;

• Improve the notification system;

• Implement more interactions in posts to increase engagement;

• Support other media formats in posts.

Our results - Key features

The "News Feed" feature offers several valuable benefits. It gathers all the news in one convenient location, organizes them by priority and time, and serves as an excellent choice for a centralized hub within an internal portal.

News Feed

Like Publications

Create & Managing Publications

The "Like" feature on the news feed provides two significant benefits: gamification and interaction.

Notifications

The "Notification" feature is a valuable tool that keeps users informed. It ensures you never miss important updates, messages, or activities, helping you stay connected and engaged with the platform's content and interactions.

The "Create and Managing Publications" feature is exclusively available to admin profiles.

They can create, edit, delete, and pin publications as needed, which enhances control over the content and communication within the platform.

This level of control ensures that important information is effectively communicated to the users.

How did we start?

Outcome of the brainstorming session - Defining paths and finding an opportunity!

What we have:

• 3 different's communication channels (Teams, E-mail and WhatsApp);

• Low adherence by the employees, having a low attendance to corporate events and formal communications;

• Hight number of doubts and request.

Benchmarking

We conducted a benchmarking exercise for the proposed solution, comparing Workplace by Facebook, Yammer, and Dialog as players in the market.

Our objective with this benchmarking was to assess the functionalities and features offered by each platform regarding the implementation of the news feed in the Deal Manager.

Upon receiving a challenge from the marketing and communication team, I, together with the Product Designer, Product Owner and Product Manager, initiated discussions on the appropriate direction to take.

Given the involvement of the marketing & communication and People and HR teams, I recommended a 'How Might We' session, considering its effectiveness in identifying opportunities and ease of facilitation with a diverse group.

We started by examining each platform individually, exploring their specific characteristics. We analyzed:

Concept

Prototyping

In terms of user experience, we are reorganizing the home page, dedicating the central part to present the feed and the right lateral to display older but essential features, such as quick access to recording hours worked, support requests, and individual development plans.

For the feed, we have created some components to demonstrate user behaviors and how individuals could navigate the interface. At this stage, we are focusing on having only two interaction options: 'like post' and 'notification alerts'. We have decided to evaluate metrics and usability before developing additional interactions.

As we have the Manager available for both mobile and desktop platforms, we have begun defining that both versions can support the feed and their interactions. However, only the web version will provide features for the administrator profile, allowing the creation, editing, fixing, updating, and deleting of news.

Key findings

1. Click-through rate (CTR):

Things that did not work & Learnings

Reflections

Informally and manually, we conducted some interesting analyses to assess the efficiency and relevance of the News Feed, and here are our findings:

• We observed a higher attendance (more than 30%) at official company events;

• There was a significant decrease (more than 25%) in frequent inquiries (number of emails and messages in Teams), especially to confirm information.

Thanks for reading!

Brainstorm

Next, we compared the platforms, identifying strengths and weaknesses of each one in relation to the company's needs. We evaluated aspects such as:

During the benchmarking, we also conducted practical tests to assess the user experience on each platform. We classified the experience in positive or concern aspects, using scenarios, such as:

• viewing and interacting with posts;

• customizing preferences, and

• receiving notifications.

After analyzing and categorizing the ideas, we identified a great solution, which involved implementing a news feed on the home page of the Deal Manager — an internal management system used by employees.

Instead of dividing attention across different channels, we decided to converge to only one software that all employees use every day at the company to administer their work hours or open a request, for example. Furthermore, we collaborated to elevate the quality of the product, building a useful homepage and providing a more informative solution.

But where we could have this and why is a good idea?!

What we would like to have:

• a dedicated section where employees could access all relevant company information, eliminating dispersion across different communication channels;

• regular updates, announcements, events, trainings, and news could be posted, notifying employees about new posts and allowing for direct interaction

With this understanding in mind, we sketched a preliminary concept of nicely features we could have.

When used to validate ideas and technical concepts with the development team, sketches facilitate a continuous feedback loop, ensuring alignment between design intent and technical implementation.

Based on the findings from the benchmarking, we identified the main functionalities to address the problem.

Sketching:

Prioritization - the impact of MoSCoW framework:

We choose use the MoSCoW prioritization method because it helps in focusing on essential features while considering potential improvements and expansions based on user feedback and organizational requirements.

This prioritization also helps create a well-defined backlog, ensuring that the team focuses on delivering high-priority items first while maintaining flexibility for future releases.

For this release, we decide to implement the 'M' (must have) of the MoSCoW and evaluate our performance and user engagement.

The Design Handoff to Developers and QA (Quality Assurance)

After designing our deliverables on Figma, as soon as we were done, we set up a meeting with the development team responsible for implementing our designs into our mobile and desktop platforms.

After explaining the flow and the characteristics of each interaction, the development team went on their mission to implement what was designed. It is very important to highlight that the design team is always open to answer questions and available for alignments.

The data - how does success look like?

Unfortunately, we do not have a Business Intelligence team working together. Even though, the Product Team decided to keep up with the success metrics have to be related to our main objective: effectively disseminating important information/news to employees.

These were the success metrics defined by the Product team in order to define our success level:

• Click-through Rate (CTR): Measuring the percentage of users who click on a post or link in the news feed, indicating engagement;

• Push Notification Engagement: Measures the effectiveness of push notifications in alerting users to important updates

• User Feedback: Collect user feedback through surveys or reviews to understand sentiments and identify areas for improvement.

Go to production & keep up with metrics!

During the first two months that the News Feed has been in production, we followed up on users' interactions, tracking the CTR, and conducted two quantitative surveys (84 users) to understand:

• Users' retention of important information;

• Collect feedback on the effectiveness of push notifications

• Collect feedback from users regarding their experiences on different devices.

2. User feedback: 1st round (before implementing the News Feed feature)

1st follow-up (30 days) = 35.07%

2nd follow-up (60 days) = 42.55%

Improvement of 21.04%

• 55% felt not very confident in retaining important information. When asked why, the most common answer was the use of multiple channels to share information.

3. User feedback: 2nd round (after implementing the News Feed feature)

• 72% are very confident in retaining important information. When asked why, the most common answer was because they had a unique place to centralize the information, and it is easier to consult/confirm information.

• More than 77% of the audience classified the user experience on different devices as good or excellent.

• When asked about whether they find the notifications helpful, if they prompt action, or if they feel they receive them at appropriate times, 44% of the audience answered that they classified them as neutral or inefficient. When asked why, the most common answer was that the notifications were hidden.

Message me on Linkedin or email me at bastostlb@gmail.com

According to our Design Process, here are the next steps after the design and development handoff:

1. When the implementation is completed, we conduct the Design Review, a moment to analyze and compare what was implemented (on the test environment) with what was designed on Figma.

2. Once both parties agree, we schedule a call with our QA and present the Figma file, explaining the flows.

3. After QA is completed, we move on to the next step.

This ensures that users can easily access and stay up to date with the latest information while maintaining a structured and user-friendly experience.

It adds an element of fun and engagement, encouraging users to interact with content and each other by showing their appreciation for posts and fostering a sense of community within the platform.

Next steps

Check them out on the prototype :)

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