Designasour Hatch
Overview
My team designed a better way to onboard new designers in Z, a highly technical business unit in IBM. This onboarding redesign enables new hires to gain domain knowledge so they can confidently contribute to their teams.
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This was created as an incubator project for IBM with 3 other UX Design Interns.
Role
UX Designer
User Research, Service Design,
Prototyping & Testing
June - July 2020 (6 weeks)
Coach Feedback
"Helena is a quick learner and has grown her communication skills and technical design craft this internship. She not only picked up InVision, Sketch, and a website editor, but also learned how a designer can interface with content creators and other stakeholders. Helena also took the time to revamp her storytelling techniques and grew as a skilled orator."
- Aubrey O'Neal, Cohort Coach
Background
IBM Z did not have an established onboarding plan for new design hires. Onboarders struggle to put together a plan for the new hires. The lack of domain knowledge new design hires have in Z, and their difficulty in growing this domain knowledge, makes it difficult for them to confidently contribute in their new job.
Original Problem Statement
Given to us by our incubator project leads: "How might we design a better way to onboard new designers in Z so that they can have the domain knowledge they need to confidently contribute to their project teams?"
Our Process
Our team used The Loop by IBM as a framework to apply Enterprise Design Thinking.
The Loop is based off of restless reinvention in diverse teams. This continuous cycle of observing, reflecting, and making, enables us to keep the user at the center of our design and treat everything as a prototype!
Understanding the Problem
We spent over 8 hours talking to 12 different sponsor users across 3 different studios around the world with the following objectives:​​
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Understand the current experience of the users
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Uncover pain points and needs
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Validate (or invalidate) our prototypes
Our team had four different types of sponsor users: Early Professional Hires, Experienced Professional Hires, Managers, and Onboarders. After talking to our users we gathered key insights:
User Personas
Based on our research, we originally decided to focus on just one user person: Early New/Professional Hires. But upon further research and prioritization with stakeholders, we landed on two personas, including an Onboarder since the the onboarder's experience directly affected the experience of the new design hire.
Jenny - Early New Hire
Jenny is 23. She just graduated college and this is her first real job. She's excited to start working at IBM and just got hired at Poughkeepsie, NY.
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Key Pain Points:​
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No consolidated resources for her
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Overwhelmed by what needs to learn/remember
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Feels unable to contribute valuable things to team
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Who to talk to?
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Impostor syndrome
Oliver - Onboarder
Oliver is 29 and he's been at IBM for 6 years now. He's a studio manager in IBM Z and takes on the role of onboarder occasionally as new hires arrive. He loves helping people and seeing them evolve.
Key Pain Points:​
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Small timeframe to prepare for onboarding
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Wears many other hats
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Difficulty replicating onboarding
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Struggles to check in with new hire
Hill Statements
(1) Within a day's notice, Oliver, an onboarder in IBM Z, can quickly curate an onboarding experience for a new design hire.
(2) Jenny, a new design hire in IBM Z, can quickly identify the resources she can use to gain the domain knowledge necessary to start contributing to her team within the first week.
From our users' pain points and needs we wrote two Hill statements to drive the rest of our project:
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Prototyping, Testing & Iterating
We knew we didn't want to just make a website, but rather focus on the entire experience of the users. This lead us to work on a multifaceted service design, and I made the following service blueprints on Invision to visualize our solutions as a whole. We also took a deep dive into the resources currently being used, and resources used for onboarding by other units in IBM.
Our team started with concept testing with our users which turned into higher fidelity prototype and constantly involved our users for feedback through continued testing, interviews and surveys.
First Iteration - Service Bluepint
Early Iteration - Onboarding Zentral
After validation testing and prioritization, we decided to toss one of our prototype ideas: training for mentors and subject matter experts. Additionally, upon learning the team did not have available developers to hand the project off to, I had to pivot from designing a website for developers and instead create a more easily implementable solution to be used almost immediately with the new design hire joining in a month. Upon interviewing and getting feedback on our prototypes, we also discovered the need to add a space for design leads to input team-specific resources.
Solution
I launched a w3 publisher page to create a consolidated resource for the users. On this IBM internal website, new hires are able to find all the resources they need and onboarders can just hand-off this resource instead of scrambling to remember what new hires need. The reaction from our users was astounding, including: "This could put us way further than we are now!"
Solution - Onboarding Zentral
The rest of my team worked on other aspects of the solution to provide a holistically improved service design for our users. Other parts of the solution included elective sessions about Z in the Early Career Patterns program, weekly check-ins with previous new hires, and Trello cards to help the users create a schedule and track progress. I updated the service blueprint to visualize how the solution items fit together.
Solution - Service Blueprint
Solution - Trello Cards
Our solution was handed off to our sponsoring team, along with an experience based roadmap with a long-term vision for what the solution could be developed into. With an extra week on our project we would have iterated more and ran more prototypes to figure out the specifics of the onboarding plan and how to schedule with progressive disclosure appropriately.
Reflection
My experience at IBM can be summarized well by this feeback from our project co-sponsor:
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"Helena was such a delightful surprise. Although somewhat soft spoken, Helena emerged as a wonderfully thoughtful leader on her team. She stepped up to co-present the team’s first ever playback, and she handled all the critique that comes with a first playback with poise. She was able to absorb what the stakeholder team taught the team, learn from it, and adjust moving forward. Helena is friendly and curious, and she asks questions that demonstrated her ability to quickly grasp complicated subjects and her genuine desire to continually learn. It’s been a pleasure watching Helena grow into the talented designer and leader she is. I hope she returns to IBM as a design researcher, because we could really benefit from her talents and genuine curiosity."
- Tyler King, Co-Sponsor & Design Lead
My biggest takeaways from this project were:
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Design Thinking: UX design is not just about nit-picking a beautiful website, it can be about improving the entire experience for the user. The users are at the center, and I am not the user.
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Research Methods: You need to start by understanding the users' pain points, whether that be from interviewing, surveying, or having them write love and break up letters.
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Stakeholders: Keeping your stakeholders in the loop is so important. They provided us with pivot, focus, and direction.
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Prioritization: We had to prioritize some findings (domain knowledge, progressive disclosure) and let go of others, adding them to the roadmap (i.e. individualized learning)
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Collaboration: So much more can be accomplished through healthy teamwork. This includes establishing expectations and figuring out the strengths of your co-workers. Remote collaboration had extra challenges and required the use of a lot of communication.
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Things I would've changed if I were to do this project over again would be to begin prototyping and establishing expectations with our leads earlier. Our team spent lots of time thinking about the different directions we could go in order to make an impact with our final deliverables. After we finally started prototyping, we learned that we could create value in many different areas.