1:1 - Mobile App Feature
A mobile application that connects users to colleagues through manager facilitation to foster a stronger, closer-knit work community. This project was completed at Workday's GWxIntern Hackathon, which took place on a single day over the course of 10 hours.
Timeline: ~8 hours
Team: Angela Chen, Mele Hamasaki, Marisa Kanemoto, Nikkie Ella, Elmer Barrera
My Role: Interaction Designer
Awards: 3rd place out of 30+ teams!
background
As part of the GWxIntern Hackathon put on by Workday, we were tasked to "showcase creative solutions to real world problems" centered around Workday's six core values - Employees, Customer Service, Innovation, Integrity, Fun, and Profitability. We were given 10 hours to identify a problem, brainstorm and develop a solution, and present it to multiple judges.
design concept
Workday Core Value: EMPLOYEES
For new hires, it can be uncomfortable and/or intimidating to reach out to higher-level management and other coworkers, especially those who they are not in regular, immediate contact with. Often, they stay in their own bubble at work, which closes opportunities to network and meet new friends. In my experience as an intern, we are encouraged to meet not only people within our team but also others who are directors, managers, and colleagues on other teams; however, even we tend to stay within our UX design bubble.
We decided to design a feature within the Workday app that encourages inter-departmental interaction and fosters a community in the workplace. 1:1 strives to eliminate the awkwardness and intimidation factor that may come with trying to set up a meeting to get to know someone that has no idea who you are or vice versa. It allows for a middleman - someone who may know you better, such as your manager - to facilitate that initial contact so that both parties are aware of interest in meeting. 1:1 is a feature that hopes to lower the barrier of entry for people trying to get guidance from senior coworkers and make them more comfortable to reach out to anyone at anytime!
Note: This is a hypothetical feature that we added to the existing Workday app. This is not a real feature that was implemented in the system.
Guiding Questions
In solving this problem, we sought to answer these three questions:
How might we help workmates meet workmates from different departments?
How might we create more transparency among different departments?
How might we create a stronger sense of community?
Persona
We want to target users who are new to the company and might not feel as comfortable reaching out to coworkers, especially if they are higher up in management.
process
Research
Competitive Analysis
We started off the research phase by performing a competitive analysis in which we explored applications whose goal was to connect people. We looked at various dating, meetup, and calendar apps to identify current industry trends that we could use to motivate our designs such as Google Calendar, Scoop, Calend.ly, and Timebridge. Each of us presented a single app and we defined things we liked as well as top priorities.
User Interviews & Survey
Because most of the participants at the hackathon were interns and therefore, new hires, we were able to find a lot of people that fit our target user. Nikkie and Elmer interviewed five participants to get a sense of their experiences in 1-on-1 meetings and their motivation behind setting up these meetings. We used some of the initial insights from the interviews to come up with the questions on our survey.
The goal of the survey was to see how often people were setting up one-on-one's that were not work-related. From the fifteen respondents and the interviews, we found that casual 1-on-1's are uncommon and skewed by department, 1-on-1's for new hires are often facilitated by a manager, and new hires typically agreed that casual 1-on-1's are helpful for work culture.
The solution
The 1:1 feature is a tool for managers to suggest people for a new hire to meet. By going onto the new hire's profile on Workday, a manager can connect him or her to someone that they believe would be a good person to get to know. After making a suggestion, both parties will receive a notification that a manager has suggested that they set up a 1-on-1. The new hire sets up the meeting by choosing duration, style, and time of the meeting. The suggested dates and times come from syncing their Outlook calendars to identify mutual availability. When the invitation is sent, the recipient can accept or propose a change to the meeting.
Stephanie's manager, Lauren, sends a suggestion for her to connect with Eric, a senior director.
Stephanie sets up the meeting based on things Eric likes to do for 1-on-1's and their calendars are synced to suggest mutual times of availability.
reflection
Though everyone should feel comfortable reaching out to anyone in their workplace, we know that it can be intimidating. This feature aims to make employees feel more comfortable reaching out to people that they want to meet, get to know, or seek advice from. We hope to lower the barrier of entry for people trying to get guidance from senior workmates. We also hope that this encourages inter-department communication given that many people tend to stay within their own departments. In all, we want to foster a stronger sense of community within a company.