Enhancing Onboarding for New Employees
MS Teams: Improving the Onboarding Experience for New Employees
New employees often struggle with unclear communication and role identification in project teams. With our new 'Projects' feature in Microsoft Teams, team members can now navigate their roles and responsibilities with ease, enhancing team integration and collaboration.
Problem - What's the issue with onboarding ?
In contemporary workplaces, integrating new employees into existing project teams is challenging due to difficulties in establishing clear communication channels and navigating complex information flows. This issue is exacerbated by the lack of streamlined communication processes and minimal actor identification, hindering new employees' ability to effectively contribute and integrate into the team.
Solution - " Project " feature for Microsoft Teams
In order to address the communication and integration challenges faced by new employees during the onboarding process, a new " Project " feature for Microsoft Teams was proposed. The feature includes a dashboard for displaying team roles, a centralized dashboard for project oversight, and a unified hub for documents and discussions. This aims to give new employees a comprehensive understanding of team roles, project overviews, and streamlined access to important project-related information.
Outcome - High-Fidelity Prototype for Enhanced Collaboration Features in Microsoft Teams was developed
A high-fidelity prototype of the proposed feature for Microsoft Teams was developed. This prototype showcases the functionality of the new features, including the team member dashboard, centralized project visibility, and the unified documentation and discussion hub.
Role
UX Researcher
Product Design
Content Design
Project Duration
Sep 2023 - Dec 2023
Team Members
Leesha Ramrakhiany
Samiha Essakhi
Helen Chan
Tools Used
Adobe Illustrator
Figma
Introduction
Background: Navigating Communication Challenges in New Employee Onboarding
In modern project teams, effective communication is key, particularly for new members integrating into established groups. This case study explores the challenges they face in understanding roles and project dynamics, and in identifying key contacts. It assesses existing communication tools to pinpoint shortcomings and proposes enhancements to streamline onboarding. The goal is to improve the new employee experience, enabling quick and effective team integration.
Defining Success
Based on our existing, comprehensive understanding of the problem space, and the detailed project brief, we meticulously defined what success in this endeavor would look like for us.
Research
Secondary Research - Evaluating Existing Workplace platforms
In the examination of various workplace communication platforms, an analysis was conducted with a focus on categorizing features rather than individual products.
Research reveals that while current workplace communication platforms excel in asynchronous and real-time interactions, they fall short in offering efficient group chats and comprehensive actor identification (ability to recognize and understand the roles and responsibilities of different team members).
Primary Research - What are the new employees saying about their onboarding experience ?
We carried out five semi-structured interviews to understand why new employees struggle with identifying the right contacts in project teams during onboarding. Here is a summary of their insights and experiences.
“ What would have helped is proper documentation on who’s responsible for part of the project .”
“ I look for the experience of the person. If the person knows more people within the organization, I feel like they would be more likely to have answers.”
Here's the to the research document if you're into that!
We went through all the snippets of data we collected by interviewing others, found common themes, and came up with the following insights.
Current State of Onboarding Experience
- Assignment of a buddy during onboarding to aid in learning contact points for projects.
- The "My Clubs" page allows users to easily view all their past and current club projects, matches, and events in one place.
Company/Role Visibility
- A desire for clarity in the organizational chart or team hierarchy to better understand team roles.
- Preference for consulting experienced employees for information and a need for a feature to track contributions in SharePoint.
Strategies to Identifying Project Contributors
- Utilizing the onboarding buddy and Outlook to determine team members' roles.
- Approaching the manager for guidance on contact points and using morning standups for role clarification and project collaboration.
Converting Ideas to guidelines
To provide a solution in the form of a digital tool that enhances the onboarding experience and eases the challenges of integrating into project teams for our target users, we formulated four design guidelines. These guidelines are grounded in insights gathered from our comprehensive research and analysis of both primary and secondary studies.
Exploration
Opportunity Area
We recognized various challenges faced by our users, and by rethinking these issues, we transformed them into design opportunities.
How might we design a system that addresses the onboarding challenges of new employees ?
Animation using stickies to illustrate the ideation, affinity mapping, and voting process to solve challenges for potential donors.
At the end of our ideation session, we introduced 'Projects' a feature integrated into Microsoft Teams. The new design will assist new employees in understanding their project roles and team dynamics. It offers a comprehensive overview of ongoing projects, connects them with relevant team members, and provides easy access to critical project documentation, tailored to each user's specific needs and roles.
Feature Design
Following our ideation phase, we focused on creating functionalities that directly address the needs identified in our research. These features, integrated into Microsoft Teams, are tailored to enhance the overall experience for new team members by providing clear and accessible information.
Here are the key features we designed:
- Dashboard showcasing team members' roles in ongoing projects.
- A centralized dashboard provides enhanced visibility into ongoing projects and detailed insights into team member involvement.
- Unified hub for consolidated project documentation and discussions.
- User profiles with sections highlighting individual contributions and project involvement.
Design
Designing the Product
After establishing a solid concept for the ideal onboarding experience within Microsoft Teams, we progressed to the design stage, with particular attention to user flow.
We began by mapping out the user journey, detailing how new employees would interact with the Teams interface to access the new features. This involved designing a logical, straightforward user flow, starting from their initial login to navigating through the various aspects of the 'Projects' feature.
Animation using stickies to illustrate the ideation, affinity mapping, and voting process to solve challenges for potential donors.
High Fidelity Designs
To show role visibility on an assigned project, we designed a onboarding feature within Microsoft Teams desktop app. The identified design guidelines were pivotal in guiding the decision-making process, ensuring that the features addressed specific challenges within the current workplace communication and collaboration landscape.
Throughout the design process, a user-centric approach was prioritized, ensuring alignment with the needs expressed by participants in the user study. The design choices that were deemed important was a chart that showed employees’ positions, team hierarchy, the projects they were currently working on, and parts of the project they were responsible for.
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Animation using stickies to illustrate the ideation, affinity mapping, and voting process to solve challenges for potential donors.
Consistency through Design Systems
In developing our solution, we placed significant emphasis on establishing a robust design system. This system encompassed a harmonized set of design elements including typography, color schemes, and icons.
We decided to align our design with the existing themes supported by Microsoft Teams on both web and desktop - default (light), dark, and high-contrast - as well as the light and dark themes on mobile. This decision was made to ensure consistency in user experience across various platforms and to cater to diverse user preferences, including those who require high-contrast settings for accessibility reasons.
As a result of this process, the ideas we have chosen to concentrate on and further develop into features are:
Prototype
Video Prototype
Video prototyping was pivotal in demonstrating the proposed features of our new onboarding system, functioning as a storytelling device to illustrate potential functionalities and benefits for new hires. I carefully chose significant use cases, wrote a script, created storyboards, produced animations, and edited the video.
This method resembled making a promotional video for a sophisticated onboarding feature, with an engaging opener and an emphasis on high-quality production
Takeaways
Learnings and Takeaways
I learned the importance of deeply understanding the challenges faced by new employees. This insight drove the design process, allowing me to create solutions that are not just functional but genuinely supportive of user needs.
Developing a high-fidelity prototype was invaluable for iterating on design ideas and understanding how users interact with the interface. It provided immediate feedback on what works and what doesn’t, especially in terms of user navigation and accessibility of information.
Things I'd do differently
- If I had more time, I would have conducted more comprehensive user research, including ethnographic studies and day-in-the-life observations, to gain deeper insights into the specific challenges and workflows of new employees. This would allow me to tailor the design even more closely to their needs..
- I would have also engaged in more iterative design cycles. Each cycle would involve creating prototypes, testing them with users, gathering feedback, and refining the design. This process would help in polishing each feature to perfection before final implementation.
