Hyper-Personalised
Engagement Platform that powered up the Experience & saved cost to the customer.

The Opportunity

An UK based asset & wealth management organisation wanted to offer associates with employee-centric experiences, by providing seamless access to information & systems. The client wanted to leverage current investments in machine learning, to hyper-personalize interactions to each individual employee.

Problem Space

Outdated tech create a fragmented work environment.
It’s one size fits all, no personalisation beyond region.
Employees juggle multiple tools for communication, harming engagement and sense of belonging.
Poor content governance and information findability leads to excessive email reliance, messaging collisions & irrelevant spam.
Platform vendor licensing cost soar.

My Role

Lead the product design
supported by a team of designers.

Collaboration

Stakeholders from corporate comms, HR, L&D, Technical Architects, Content writers, developers, QA and colleagues (end users) from across geography

Responsibilities

Building Project Vision
Research and Insights
Business Capability Definition
Validation and MVP finalisation
Design Execution - User Experience including UI Design validation - Pre and post release

Success Metrics

Nominated for Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards under design honour category.
The new platform will help organisation save ~£0.25M per year on software license and operations cost.
On the day of launch, the newly developed engagement platform attracted over 4000 unique employees visits more than 28000 sites over desktop and mobile devices.
Mobile accessibility has led to a significant surge in portal engagement, particularly after office hours, during employee commutes. Previously, mobile or outside office portal experience is nil.
Increased employee engagement metrics: News Centre with 74% colleague viewership at 7 min 5s average time spent per visit, Finance Systems - 4 min 31s, Sustainable Investing Hub - 3 min 6s and Investment News - 2 min 14s

Design Process

We structured the design process in such way to navigate diverse needs and gather consensus from multiple stakeholders so that we can move them from current systems without much technical as well as political disruptions.

Multi-track Research

We divided the research into three tracks to engage both end users and key stakeholders. This will help us understand the user needs as well as ensuring the stakeholders have the right tools to deliver the intended experience effectively.

Key Discovery activities

Some of the analytics data we gathered and analysed during our desk research.

The key activities and insights gathered during the discovery phase are outlined below

Desk Research: Gathered the existing analytics data to make data driven decisions.

We initiated the discovery with gathering and analysing the available analytics data. Which includes the existing portal analytics, recent colleague survey specific to the portal, also filtered out relevant data from yearly puls survey. This helped us in narrowing down on the focus areas for the other discovery activities.

Discovery workshop: We used interactive Mentimeter tool in this workshop in achieving clarity & consensus on business needs, vision, & project success.

The key learnings from the workshop are...

Value proposition

Show employees we listened
Demonstrate WIIFM
Promote the portal via campaigns
Spread colleague success stories

Motivations

Exit Obsolete Technology
Improve collaboration
Enhanced User Experience
Support One Org
Personalization
Cloud Migration
Mobile Access

Challenges

Stakeholder consensus
Accepting Change
Content Updating
Inability to translate on-prem features
Migration Complexities

Success factors

Enhanced Engagement
Intuitive navigation
Easy content creation
More colleague content
Streamlined communication
Efficient publishing workflow
Metrics to Measure utilization

Expectations

Seventy-five percent said they preferred the employee experience portal to function like a Swiss army knife, offering everything in one place, rather than like a kitchen knife, which focuses on a single task.

Leadership briefing: The Head of colleague communication briefed us on their vision for the portal.

The key focus areas from this briefing are:

Increase adoption through consumer grade experience.
Now it's one size fits all create a personalized experience.
Empower the communicators with better tools & processes

Stakeholder Discussions: Had in-person discussions with stakeholders who will enable the portal like Group IT lead Architect, Portal admin, Corporate comms team, Head of content team, L&D head, and Department comms head.

Stakeholders walked us through their current setup, processes, to get first–hand information on their aspirations, and pain points. We gathered the analytics data during discussions to make data driven decisions.

End User Research: Conducted semi-structured one-to-one interviews for employees across demography.

Interviewed associates from diverse functions, roles, and seniorities.
Participants included HR, IT, and Corporate Communications representatives.
Covered topics like portal expectations, intranet sentiments, tools usage, corporate communication, pain points, feedback mechanisms, engagement, & emotions.

Stakeholder Voice

Atomic Research Methodology

We leveraged Atomic Research Methodology, Hence in our research report, we summarized the findings for each opportunity area, providing key insights backed by facts, along with recommendations for leveraging these opportunities. The "Engagement" opportunity area is detailed out below, and similarly, we analyzed all six identified areas.

Personas

We created user personas based on interviews conducted with end 12 users, analytics and stakeholder insights, reflecting key portal usage patterns.

Research Summary

Here is the summary of our research learnings for each of the opportunity areas.

Defining Business Capabilities

Using the research data we created the business capability statements, required to enable the needs for each opportunity areas.

Feature Mapping

For each business capability, to realize the benefit, we deduced the potential features, that are required in the engagement portal.

Feature Prioritization

We devised engagement portal features & process adjustments.
Validated them with architects & the development team for technical requirements and cost estimates.
For effortless feature prioritising, we augmented the cost estimation with an Effort Vs Impact Matrix
Shared with stakeholders for final validation and consensus.

Tree Testing

We conducted tree testing to validate the effectiveness of the information architecture. We gave scenarios and asked users to navigate via global navigation to find information for the scenario, to understand user's mental modal and navigation efficiency.

Our Recommendations

Remove duplicates of elements found in multiple locations (e.g., Financial glossary, Our Locations, DEI Network).
Move "Speak-up and Whistleblowing" to HR Information and "Volunteering" to People and Places.
Group "Our Strategy" and "Our Business" under a single section.
Remove PDFs from Development & Career and promote them via quick links.
Purchasing and payment of goods can be moved to procurement hub
Finance system can be under Finance hub
UK workplace hub can be in people and places.

View the summary of learnings from tree testing that led to the above recommendations.

Mainly used to find information, revealing flaws in the site's overall structure.

Participants found top-level menu items unclear (e.g., "Our Business" vs. "Our Strategy"), unsure of content without opening menus.

Users easily understood "Our Company" and "News" sections.

Difficulty in locating policies and reports, often searching under wrong menus.

Uncertainty on where to provide feedback.

Users easily navigated HR-related content.

Misplaced expectations, users expected whistleblowing under HR and financial glossary in "You at Work."

Low Fidelity Prototyping - Insights to Interfaces

These initial designs serve as a visual bridge between abstract concepts and concrete user interfaces. We leveraged these prototypes to embody our research learnings and also played a pivotal role in our evaluation process, engaging both project stakeholders and end-
users in meaningful discussions and iterations.

HOME

DEPARTMENT

NEWS

ARTICLE

Design Validation

Validated initial designs with technical and business stakeholders using click-through prototypes. Refined designs based on stakeholder input. Conducted usability testing with colleagues from varied roles and seniorities. Led discussions on personalization, ease of use, information findability, layout, feedback mechanisms, engagement, & overall experience.

Usability Testing Participant Feedback

High Fidelity Design

Through rigorous validation sessions with both technical and business stakeholders, coupled with comprehensive end-user testing, we
refined our initial concepts into their final form. As a result, we strategically prioritized features, reserving some user-requested enhancements for future phases due to their complexity and resource demands.

Home Page

Responsive Design

Department Page

News Page

Article Page

Next Steps

Establish an Engagement Portal focal point group with representatives across the organization to brainstorm features, gather user feedback, and build the backlog.
Use data-driven metrics and qualitative research to identify evolving needs for continuous improvement.
Enable employees to access and act on information from various systems within a unified interface.
Improve content tagging to promote narrowcasting, ensuring the portal is tailored to individual employee needs.
Make the portal part of the flow of the work by integrating it into communication platforms like Teams and Slack to engage associates who are less active.
Identify and take measures to move those packets of associates using shadow IT software that are competing with engagement portal. This will improve engagement and avoid information duplicity.