Human-friendly digital transformation
Role: Lead UX designer
Company: Wärtsilä
Year: 2018-2020
Transformations can be scary when they occur in our work place. For many employees at Wärtsilä, undergoing a digital transformation rose more questions than answers and created a state of uncertainty and opposition to digitalization. That until our tool WeLeap came to be.
WeLEAP is an awareness content platform that brings information and practical knowledge to employees regarding staying relevant in a digitalised world. The platform combines up-to-date content with gamification and collaboration to reduce the uncertainity gap that "becoming digital" brought to employees. The concept is simple: "We live and work in a digital world but, with WeLEAP, taking the step into it doesn't need to be scary".
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
Content creation
Responsibilities:
1. Research on digital transformations & users
2. Research on gamification
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
2018 was a year of change for Wärtsilä as their called "Digital Transformation" became a major pilar in their strategy. However such generated a lot of anxiety in people who would go from being uncertain of their skills to people thinking machines would take their jobs. The idea was to frame the uncertainty into something positive. Like good things might happen if you take a leap of faith. However to address this, we needed more than a good attitude, but a platform that delivers. Trust in the process was the goal. Read more here.
"How can we support employees through the digitalisation process through a platform that tackles their uncertainties and addresses their real concerns in context and actively involves them in it?"
Research
The first step in this project was to get a deep understanding of what Wärtsilä´s digital transformation strategy and what were the reasons behind employes' skepticism and even reluctance to adopt it. On top of that, researching aimed to find ways in which users can be more engaged with the strategy and the content related to it.
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The Digital Transformation:
The Digital Transformation the company was aiming to go through came with a lot of digital updates that impacted the ways of working of the employees. For example, there were now more digital tools that employees were meant to be using and a lot of trainings aimed to develop one's skills in software and platform usage. Some tasks were now meant to be undertaken through some of these digital platforms, completely replacing analog ways. This transformation was part of a massive strategy renewal in the company and results were expected in a short span. However eloquently the reasons behind this changes were told, the truth is that the company experienced a big amount of resistance to change. This is were my team played a key role in developing a way to ease this transition and shift the behavior of the employees into not only accepting change but adopting it and become an active part of it.
Research:
The first step for me was to conduct research. I wanted to understand the reasons behind employees' rejection of the Digital Transformation and the areas of opportunity for changing that behavior. The research process involved firstly, talking to employees across all the functions and of all the levels and then a series of workshops to find out ways to shift the behaviors.
The first round of interviews included a large sample of employees (approximately 100) where few questions were asked regarding the digital transformation. The questions aimed to find out:
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a) What they knew about the Digital Transformation
b) What they think it meant to their jobs
c) How did they feel about it
d) What would they do different regarding it / What would they like to see or hear about it
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This first round of questions did not include mentioning in detail about the project but a brief mentioning of it in the end. From this interviews there were a lot of different points and insights drawn but also some patterns that made it easier for me to explain what the situation was to my team. In general there was a clear distinction on the opinions and feelings about digitalisation amongst people depending on their age group. Younger users were more accepting of it but required much more than just one more tool to make them engaged. However older people were almost on the other side of the spectrum. For them digitalisation represented an uncharted territory and a threat to everything they have built with the years. In their minds, becoming digital meant indirectly, allowing technology do what they were experts on. In other words, there was a fear of being replaced and a feeling of threat to their professional pride. It was interesting to see that this group of users were also intentionally oblivious to what the strategy was. They simply refused to accept it and become aware of it or reading about it implied acceptance to them. This only contributed more to the circle of misinformation and increased the resistance. For this group of people the most important was trust and they did not trust management just forcing a decision like this on to them. They required a different approach that didn't just make them change but made them part of building that change and above all, met them as people.The results were very similar regardless the countries, but naturally, more developed countries had a more positive impression of digitalisation than those less developed.
The results helped us identify some user personas, being the two more typical, as follows:
Younger employee (usually entry and jr. level)
Much more in contact with digital technologies in their day to day. Used to technology and eager to try new tools. They are either indifferent to the Digital Transformation strategy or generally accepting it as a normal transition.
Key user needs:
Engaging tools with a degree of familiarity
Simple language and relatability
Less corporate jargon
Interactivity more than passive learning
Key challenges:
Keep them engaged
Make a meaningful connection
Keep the tool professional
Seasoned employee (senior and above level)
Technology usage to a minimum level. Highly accomplished and proud professionals. Skeptical about digital doing what they have for years and afraid that it will overtake. Generally rejects the idea of letting digital do their jobs and dissatisfied with the way management is pushing digital into their lives.
Key user needs:
Accessible and meaningful information
More human approach
Reassurance about their importance as professionals
A sense of control and ownership
Key challenges:
Accessibility
Reflect understanding of their needs
Maintain a certain level of familiarity
Engagement
The second part of the research included a series of workshops in which the main idea was to understand how could we build a platform that met these users needs. We decided to give priority to the more difficult users as they were the majority keeping, however all of the users needs in mind while designing.
The workshops included several people locally and some remote participants and the goal was to ideate on ways to connect and engage with content and the transformation itself. The workshops had more participation than expected which led to different kinds of ideas and insights that helped shape WeLEAP. From these workshops, I was able to define the main design principles:
WeLEAP core design principles:
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Interacting with content over passive reading.
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User input over siloed work
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Design for collaborative growth
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Purposeful gamification
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Real over produced
The design principles guided the design process from the beginning and gained strength as the project continued. The principles are intended to deliver an experience that makes the users active participants of the Digital Transformation by offering interactive and collaborative ways to interact with the content, themselves and the strategy.
Designing WeLEAP
Designing WeLEAP as an experience of ownership and control of the employees over their work required a lot of collaboration them along the process and constant sense of understanding. For this reason, validating sessions and workshops became a normal practice developing WeLEAP. As the lead designer of the project, I involved everyone from leadership to developers in every validation and testing activity we had with users. This helped the team have a better collective understanding of the user needs and made it easier to ideate and develop features. One special activity designed for WeLEAP was an open day in which everyone was welcomed to visit our area and ask, test and suggest changes or share ideas.
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From wireframes to deployment
WeLEAP was designed mainly by using a combination of Sketch and Zeplin which allowed for better communication with developers and facilitated satisfactory testing with users and stakeholders. As mentioned before, developers were heavily involved in several design activities and, in the same fashion, I got involved in development as well creating a very ideal setting for collaboration while designing the platform. Additionally, as read in the Design principles, WeLEAP included gamification as a mean for meaningful collaboration between users with their colleagues and the content but the design aimed for creating meaningful ways to collaborating that felt purposeful and not just a "nice to have". The design always looked for new ways to engage the users with the content and as time went by it incorporated more and more collaborative elements such as comment sections or collaborative activities within learning modules. Designing them raised the need to have an independent design system for WeLEAP that, even though close to our brand identity, showed the platform as a unique and independent world.
WeLEAP's design combined a lot of great user experience with a deep understanding of the users and their needs. This led the platform not only shift the users behavior from complete rejection of the Digital Transformation to embrace it and make it successful by actively gettin involved in it by using and engaging with the platform and outside of it. The continuous cycles of validation and user research ensured that WeLEAP and its design kept relevant at every moment.
WeLEAP makes it easy, not only to learn what Transformation means, but to actively take part of it through collaboration, gamification and an intuitive interface. More importantly WeLEAP doesn't respond to the corporate needs, but to its users real concerns, needs and expectations.
An overall view of all that's relevant to you
The landing page of WeLEAP gives the users a personalised overview of all the relevant content or activities inside (and even outside) the platform. Here you can find what new content is coming, resume activities, sign up for events and have a look at other employees activities or progress. Here you can also find tailored recommendations based on your role, completed learnings and network.
The pillars of our culture await to be discovered
As a permanent collection in a museum, WeLEAP hosts a collection of content: The Companion Stories. These are bite-sized content pieces organised in sequence and hidden. The user then unlocks each content as they go. The initial concept hosted five major "paths" related to the culture in Wärtsilä but expanded due to their success to include also introductory content to Wärtsilä's main industries.
All the knowledge a Wärtsiliän needs in one place. Created for them, by them.
WeLEAP is a content platform that provides its users with quality content through its main content item modal that allows to visualise all kinds of media and text inside a card. Content items can be rated and commented on to keep the communication open between the content creators and the users so as between themselves. WeLEAP is not only curated and high quality content, but content made for Wärtsiliäns by Wärtsiliäns. Thanks to WeLEAP anyone can request to create content that is relevant to all the employees.
Track your own journey
WeLEAP incorporates some gamification elements like points per completed learning. Within a users dashboard, one can take a look at their own journey, earn badges, see the global ranking and keep track of their progress. Some saved learnings can also be visualised here.
Remarks
Due to an NDA, real names of users and modules are not displayed in this portfolio. The project began in 2018 with a small team and budget and by the year 2020, WeLEAP was an established tool and the main content portal for much more than its original purpose. Through our work we reshaped the content strategy and approach making WeLEAP a tool by employees and for employees implementing content creation features that ensured high quality content creation. During the Covid-19 crisis, WeLEAP also served as a tool for getting information and connecting people remotely. WeLEAP's design system also became a reference for other internal tools while interacting heavily with Wärtsilä's one, which I also collaborated with. After successfully achieving the digital transformation's strategy goals, WeLEAP's design principles and system serve now as a reference for new tools.
