An HR portal that works
Role: Lead UX designer
Company: Wärtsilä
Year: 2020-2022
Let's face it, sometimes, when you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. MyHR was born from the idea of having a truly meaningful HR portal that serves its users with their real problems by understanding how those problems get dealt with and everything and everyone around them.
MyHR is an in-house-made HR platform in which all the different needs of employees are met regarding HR. The platform serves as a one-stop shop that aims to simplify the processes through digitalisation while keeping it human-friendly and aware of the employees real needs and troubles. The portal is now the official touchpoint for HR matters in the company globally.
My role in short:
Lead UX/UI designer
Research and facilitation
Ideation, concepting and validation
Validated and tested platform design for development
Collaboration enablement with business and development
Responsibilities:
1. Research on platforms & users
2. Process mining assistance
3. Data analysis
4. Workshop facilitation
5. Ideation and collaboration enablement
6. User personas, journey mapping and service blueprinting
7. Low and High-fidelity design and prototyping
8. Concept validation and user testing
Context
Wärtsilä went through a cultural transformation around 2018 led by digitalisation. With multiple tools for different processes, employees often got confused and depended on the HR experts to answer even simple questions like "where can I check my holidays?". HR would often lack time and resources to respond to those ones that really needed their help. The Covid-19 lockdowns made it even more unsustainable. This is where our team found a great opportunity to create a platform that responded efficiently to the employees and HR agents.
"How could we help employees with their HR related problems and questions efficiently, offering quick solutions to the quick-fix problems and specialised help to those in need of it? How could we fit it all in a one-stop-shop platform?"
Research
Our team's first step was to get a deep understanding of the different elements revolving around this ambitious project. The research revolved around two main topics: The processes and the users.
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The Processes:
The first thing we found was that the different services offered by the HR unit were hosted by different platforms, using different technologies and different data processes. This resulted on a chaotic user experience where disruptions occurred often. For example: Imagine you want to get your vacations approved and you need to get into a portal to check your days balance, jump to a completely different one to submit your days and end up in a different one to manage the approvals. Not only the processes were difficult and confusing, but most of the users rather ask directly to HR agents rather than get through the process themselves. On top of this, different services would claim to use different data than other services for what they preferred to host and manage it separately. Our research found out that, not only different services were using the same data, but some just did not know of the existence of other services even when they were directly related to their own. In other words, Not only services were working in silos, but sometimes, the silo extended to different parts of the same service. Finally, a big problem was, a mentioned before, the overuse of HR agents. As processes, and interacting with them, was too complicated and time wasting, users rather ask HR agents. This meant that their desk was saturated with questions, many of them too basic to be considered an agent issue.
1.
Confusion and time-consuming interactions due to processes being scattered through several platforms.
2.
Waste work as many services shared processes and resources such as data but were not aware of it.
3.
Overuse of HR agents as a result from users avoiding any interaction with the HR service platforms.
The Users:
The user research contemplated two main groups of users. Firstly, the employees who interacted with the different services, including those who only used them to get approvals and those who also gave those approvals. On the other hand we needed to also consider the different HR agents that provide services. The user research involved employees in Finland and globally and focused on their experiences with the services and the platforms they get delivered at. Additionally, the interviews inquired about their different experience goals and real needs.
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After 3 weeks of research, we summarized our findings in three personas archetypes, briefly described as follows:
The employee portal user
Main user of the services without the need to approve or manage anyone.
Needs: Simple interactions, uniform experience, simple information & the key information available.
Key challenges: To know where to get their needs solved in the easiest way possible
The manager portal user
Main user of the services but needs to approve or manage others.
Needs: Simple interactions, uniform experiences, the less interactions the better & key information available.
Key challenge: To be able to interact with the platform as little as possible. Approve and move on.
The HR agent
Main user of the services without the need to approve or manage anyone.
Needs: Simple interactions, inquiry filtering separating the "real issues" and the questions.
Key Challenge: To be able to reduce the number of tickets they receive by focusing on those that are relevant.
The main insights from the research showed the need of having all the services, or as many as possible, under the same portal but, more importantly, to create an experience that was clear, easy and straightforward. Through speaking with different users, we realised that the perfect experience for the employees was usually described as "one where I can spend as less time as possible interacting with the platform". In other words, simplicity was the key for them. On the other hand, HR agents that usually provide some services and support to the employees often found themselves with thousands of tickets that instead of issues, contain basic questions like "where can I book my holidays?" The agents often found themselves frustrated answering the same "basic" question several times in a day.
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From this research process, that included surveys, interviews and some workshops, it was clear that the design needed to contemplate bringing a very easy and practical experience that also focused on helping the users find their way and change their behavior towards HR agents.
Designing MyHR
Designing MyHR required a lot of collaboration with stakeholders but the technical teams as well. We worked on this portal making sure that we were all involved in the process despite the Covid limitations. We found a strong opportunity in the collaborative features of some of the design tools we used (Zeplin in the beginning and later on Figma) allowing access to many stakeholders and user testing groups who also had access to the prototypes. In terms of design, it was very important that developers, users and stakeholders could have visibility and could comment on most of the aspects of the designs. Making everyone part of the design process plus validation as a common practice, we managed to create a solution that truly works for all of our users.
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An extra layer of security by design
The during the design process we noticed something interesting about the users' behavior. Many employee users expressed their preference for a mobile-focused experience because they typically would use commuting time or small breaks to deal with all the HR tasks. However, when dealing with sensitive information or things that mattered greatly to them, like money, they would not do it on their mobile devices. Some users admitted making very important mistakes when they were not fully focused on the tasks involving this information. Additionally, the HR agents deal with this kind of problem rather frequently. Together with the users and HR agents, we co-created an experience that works in all kinds of devices but limits certain processes to Desktop. This not only reduced the risk for errors but creates a sense of safety in users who are no longer afraid of making an unintentional mistake and reduced the number of accidental mistake tickets the HR agents received.
MyHR is a one-stop shop for all your HR related matters. Here you can easily find information about the most common problems, take on most of the HR related processes, and track your own, and stay in touch with Wärtsilä's team of HR experts. All in one place.
All the relevant information for you
MyHR features a homepage dashboard with all the relevant information for the employee or Line Manager. Here you can also create a support request to HR agents with a clear categorisation that makes priorisation easier for the agents as the requests are filtered based on importance through tagging giving HR experts the necessary information to decide which to attend first. My HR features also an AI chatbot designed address users questions and capable of directing them to the information that can answer their questions. The idea is that the users can ask the chatbot and reach the agents only when a problem, that matches any of the request categories, arises.
Managers and the processes around them
The design of MyHR varies slightly between the employee and the manager versions. The latter offers a view to one's personal information and that of the employees under the user. My Team (called "Me" for non-line managers) is where Managers can keep track of all the processes involving members of their team or teams. This includes vacations, job requisitions, annual targets, corporate bonuses, etc. Tracking the processes here helps to keep all the involved parties in the loop without saturating their email inboxes by going back and forth with e-mail chains. If a process needs attention, it automatically appear here as well. Even though most of the emailing is gone, MyHR will notify the users with an email when there is an important process awaiting for you in MyHR. The key strength of MyHR in this regards is that all the processes can be started, managed and followed-up within the same platform.
Managers and the processes around them
One of the main goals of MyHR was to cut some waste work from the HR agents, giving them more time to respond efficiently to the user's needs and process-related issues. While this was tackled with the Support Request system and the chatbot, learning was also a key component for this concept to work. In the past the processes and the auxiliary information such as instructions, guiding documents and tutorials were stored separately in their own MS platform making it tedious for the users to jump onto and search manually for their information, assuming their search would match the document old tags. MyHR aimed to fix that problem and make guiding information simple, more user-friendly and accessible. That is how Knowledge came to be. In this section, users can find curated and up-to-date content regarding the most FAQ and the HR processes in the platform. Thus, employees can access these anytime they have a practical question and our chatbot can direct you to find the one that suits you better.
Remarks
Due to an NDA, the final designs could not be shown in this portfolio. The project began in 2020 and up to the year 2022, 90% of the HR processes were mapped and conceptualized and some new ones emerged as the result of MyHR's increasing popularity and feedback from the users. At that year the main HR processes were designed and deployed to be used by all the Wärtsilä's employees globally with exception of those countries where data regulations differ from the common. By the moment I left Wärtsilä, MyHR had already established as a permanent project supported by leadership and up to this day it is still used and keeps growing.
