This is a case study on an internal tool used at a large corporate bank. The information below has been white-lablled where appropriate for your consumption.
The following shows a couple of screenshots on the information architecture for the site. Not all flows included below.
People do not often receive full trust when joining a new team. This is especially true for UX designers joining as the sole designer and Subject Matter Expert for the team. You have to prove yourself given you do not have a direct manager to vouch for you. In this scenario, the best way to do this is to get buy-in.
When I first started on this project, I asked for a list of users to speak to before doing any designs, but this was met with some pushback as they informed me they had some anecdotes and feedback on the direction to go.
In order to get their buy-in, I used some of the feedback they had to do a UX audit, redesigned the website using general design principles and presented it to the stakeholders. These initial designs are presented below (after the prototypes).
This gave me some buy-in, which ultimately led to acquiring the list of users. Once I was given the list, I was able to conduct some interviews and usability testing as demonstrated in further sections below which ultimately led to more redesigns.
The following is a rough sketch of prototypes i made in order to guide my thinking for the designs to show the stakeholders
This shows the homepage for the website. Both below and after the fold.
Initial design for the detailed page which a user gets to by clicking a line from the table on the homepage. Both below and after the fold.
The low-fidelity designs offer hiring managers a streamlined experience. The homepage features a hero section, status cards, and a detailed table, with key information visible above the fold. A footer provides additional links. The detailed page, accessed via the homepage, gives in-depth information on each hire, enabling managers to take necessary actions as they scroll.
This was presented to stakeholders in 3 stages- header, hero and cards - but this has been presented here in combination for completeness.
One of the edge cases that was presented is, senior level individuals (e.g. a director), could often have a lot of indirect hires due to their various reportees. This can present a lot of information overload, so a way to mitigate that was to cap the max number at 150. But give them the option to export 'all' (not shown).
A good UX law applied here is the Goal Gradient Effect- “The tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity to the goal.” - by using the circular ring to denote progress.
Type of language used is also important when you would like a user to take specific actions. For example, in the old design, there was a section titled “Recommended Actions for you”, upon probing I found out that the list of “Recommended Actions” were optional and did not need to be taken immediately. So I changed it to “Other Actions…” in order not to confuse users.