Royal Mail

To provide a go-to learning platform for managers who felt stuck in a job with no progression or support options. Managers needed a platform that encouraged them to take on new challenges and responsibilities, as well as a safe environment to address questions and advance their careers.

We began by defining the project's vision by developing a set of values and outlining all of the platform's priorities through a user and stakeholder workshop. We then devised a strategy for achieving this within the restrictions of business and technology. The standout questions of the workshop were:

What are the benefits of using the platform?
Why would a user find time to use the platform?
Can the platform support the vision we were trying to achieve?
How are we going to shift the users mindset to succeed?

We also run a hopes and fears kick-off exercise to encourage everyone in the room to share their hopes and wishes for the project and also share their fears, questions and worries.

Although this was an internal platform a competitive analysis was an essential part of the design process to help the businesses gain valuable market insight, to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the potential product, and develop an effective product strategies to produce winning results.

We utilised a qualitative approach, ensuring that we addressed real user issues. Through a series of interviews, we determined the users' key issues. We observed that one of the users' biggest issues was having to search across multiple platforms to find what they were looking for and once found the information wasn't intuitive. We also found as they didn't completely understand the benefits, they felt the platform to be more of a hindrance assuming there was no value in the effort to find time to use the platform.

We began the next phase of the project after gathering insights and coordinating our findings. We started by designing personas based on our user group. This was a crucial step in remembering who we were designing for by maintaining a thorough awareness of the target audience's expectations, concerns, and motivations. As part of this step we also created an empathy map to articulate what we know about a particular type of user.

We created a timeline skeleton with the succession of user goals and actions from the personas and mapped the as-is procedure a user goes through in order to achieve that goal. This helped identify and document existing problems, pain points and validated problems that we could work through to create an ideal solutions.
We started the "to-be" procedure, which was a good approach to merge multiple user perspectives, while keeping the possible solution/goals in mind. We were able to define benchmarks, compose stories, and prioritise our goals as a result of this.

We started by creating a visual site map of the pages that were already there or that we needed to add. Starting with onboarding, this made it simple to group the pages into a logical hierarchy. This not only helped us visualise the needs, but it also helped us verify technology problems that we needed to test, such as navigation enhancements.

Before we started wireframing, we needed to figure out how the material will be organised. One of the main pain points was having to search across multiple platforms to find what they were looking for and once found the information wasn't intuitive. We attempted to organise the content in two ways: one by grouping by job and the other by categorising them by topic. Because of the overlap in management tasks when dealing with subjects like attendance or coaching, grouping them by job wouldnt work so we went with categorising them by topic.

We then started to define the relationships between pieces of content. Hierarchical, sequential, and matrix were the three basic organisational structures we tested. Because we needed parent/child relationships between pieces of material, we adopted a hierarchical structure. This allows the user to drill down into the content by selecting a category.

We started with the user onboarding flows that would be use to engage new users and showcase the benefits of using the platform. We then moved on to 'Fix it,' which was the platform's main focus point because it was the go-to learning area where users could ask questions and find the answers. We utilised actual data and information so that users could evaluate each flow without guesswork during testing.