Revolutionize Employee Portal

Centralizing 196 Systems for Impact: 82%+ user satisfaction growth and 65%+ productivity boost, navigating challenges in UX integration and diverse stakeholder collaboration.

Project profile

Time

Oct 2022 - Mar 2024

Role

UX lead

Team

2 UX designers and a UI designer; partnered with the project team

Project Brief

In 2022, a B2B semiconductor firm, embarked on updating its outdated employee portal which includes 196 system modules. I was chosen to lead this project, with the goal of enhancing administrative, operational, and informational requirements with a intuitive and cohesive user experience.

My Main Contributions

  1. Build POC

  2. Embed UX in project development

  3. Develop testing practice

  4. Establish Design Standards

  5. Mentor Designers and Enhance Stakeholders’ Capability

Final outcome

82 %+

Growth in user satisfaction

65 %+

Productivity boost

By improving cross-functional collaboration and adhering to a "fail fast, learn faster" strategy, we successfully addressed system deficiencies, resulting in an 82% increase in user satisfaction and over 65% rise in productivity. Positive feedback emphasized the ease to find previous applications, while constructive criticism regarding the difficulty of navigating tables with multiple columns has shaped our direction for future enhancements.

Before (Since 2016)

Insufficient information

Poor user experience

After

Clear Hierarchy

Satisy every user types

Main challenge

New development process

Given that the UX team is a relatively new addition to our organization, there is a notable gap in incorporating UX practices into the development lifecycle.

Limited foundation and resources

Faced with challenges of lacking technical documentation for understanding the existing 196 system business framework and a small UX team with one novice designer, we needed to interview application owners for business clarity and mentor our designers for effective outcomes.

Diverse stakeholder types

The stakeholders range from CIO, team managers, engineers, administrators with limited knowledge in UX. This diversity complicates collaboration, as there's a lack of clarity on how the UX team can contribute value to the project and work cohesively with others.

Milestone 1: Build POC

We recognized the importance of swiftly constructing prototypes for each system to gather critical feedback from employees. Consequently, we chose two systems of medium complexity and distinct functionalities immediately after initiating the project to evaluate the feasibility, viability, and desirability of the employee portal, aiming to derive insights from high-level stakeholders. The systems selected for POC were the leave application and inbox modules.

POC 1 - Inbox

Our employees had a strong desire for a web platform due to security concerns. This module required customization to cater to the varied needs of different user groups, including managers, employees, and business owners. Managers needed functionalities to view and search for applications requiring their approval, as well as those already approved. Employees sought features to track their requests and view their submission history. Business owners, on the other hand, required permissions to oversee applications relevant to their domain of responsibility. The team used Figma to build the rapid prototype.

請輸入

All

A option

B option

POC 2 - Leave application

The goal for this module was to streamline the process for employees to complete and submit leave application forms and to enable them to monitor the status of their submissions through their inbox, facilitating an efficient overview of the application's progress.

Leave of Absence

https://www.LeaveAbsence.com

Milestone 2: Develop UX process

When the project initiate, each division had its own unique priorities, posing a challenge in aligning them with an actionable plan. Hence, I illustrate the concept and the broader vision in cross-functional meetings. This allowed the team to visually and clearly recognize the critical systems, which we can broke down into detailed feature-level user flows for in-depth discussions.

Current service blueprint

To enhance resource planning and design the information architecture for 196 systems, I collaborated with business owners to gain insights and create service blueprints for each system. These blueprints clearly illustrated the relationships between service components, improving our understanding and guiding more effective resource distribution and design choices.

Resource planning and workflow guide

Even with a clear visual alignment on the project's broad vision, senior executives were still uncertain about how to allocate resources for this major initiative involving the UX team. Therefore, I developed a visual resource planning and workflow guide, emphasizing task assignment based on the autonomy of each system and the reusability of functions, as defined in the service blueprints. This approach not only clarified resource allocation for managers but also enhanced collaboration among the development team, business owners, and users.

Prototype and Test

Given our limited understanding of current users, it was essential to test uncertain features beforehand to proceed with confidence. Facing a tight schedule and Covid situation, we employed various methods to collect insights, including usability testing with senior executives, interviews with business users, and discussions with new employees virtually.

Milestone 3: Building Cross functional relationships and UX impact

As the project’s stakeholders consist of 25+ groups of business owners from diverse sectors with limited UI/UX understanding, it makes it challenging to gather information for a consistent and intuitive design. Hence, instead of initiate the project right away, I conducted UI/UX interactive workshops, educating them on the importance and benefits of UI/UX design, while also training them on effective collaboration with development teams to ensure alignment between user needs and design implementation. In the result, Users have a clearer understanding of how to express their feedback, which provides the team with a clearer direction for design and reduces communication costs.

Learn more about UX workshops I facilitate →

Milestone 4: Formulating reusable design principles and facilitating mentorship

Establishing Design Guidelines for Reusability

Our aim was to rapidly deliver a consistent design across 196 systems. Thus, it is critical to fully understand each system's core functions before defining reusable components. Recognizing the significance, I took the mission to build design guidelines with UI team and share it across functional team by using Figma and HTML CSS. This initiative not only established a common comprehension of the information architecture across the systems but also set clear expectations for stakeholders regarding the final deliverables.

Mentorship outcome

To achieve the project's deadline and meet business owners' expectations, it was essential for our design team to have the capability to independently develop prototypes.  took the lead in mentoring, sharing critical design knowledge, and conducting extensive sessions to solidify the junior UX designers' understanding of the project's framework. My mentorship allowed a junior UX designer to transition from needing help to individually creating seven prototypes and wireframes in a single month, greatly contributing to the success of the Employee Portal project,

Impact

Reusable UI components for design system

There were a lot of UI components developed and structure defined throughout this project that became actual guidelines that could be used when designing internal systems.

Internal influence

Best practice for team collaboration

Traditionally, the UX workflow involved short phases with limited research and lacked user testing. This project marked the first occasion where the UX, development team and business users collaborated closely from research and design through to user testing. The outcome was a remarkable 82% improvement in user satisfaction, establishing a new standard within the organization.

UX education

Previously, employees lacked understanding of UI/UX principles and how to improve their systems by adopting a user-centric approach, as the emphasis was often placed on immediate solutions rather than on addressing user pain points and goals. Through my facilitation, 73.5% of employees began to recognize the value of UX and 10% of them apply UX principles at work.

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