Overview
Welcomary is a learning management system (LMS) created to enhance the onboarding and employee experience. It’s designed to easily load, host and share information crucial for new hires onboarding into an organization. From tasks to company terminology to teams, Welcomary streamlines the onboard process and provides a simple, turnkey community platform that keeps employees connected to essential knowledge and each other.
Role
I was the sole UX/UI designer on a small team of six. My core responsibilities included creating all of the interface and experience standards; ideating concepts, creating and enforcing a style guide & roadmap, wireframing, prototyping and delivering Agile UX for welcomary’s web application.
Methods Used
Product Strategy, Heuristics, Weekly Stakeholder Meetings, Collaboration in Agile, Feature Prioritization, User Flows, Usability Testing, Prototyping & Iterating, Focus Groups, Unmoderated & Remote Moderated Testing.
Tools
Figma, Illustrator, Zoom
Timeline
May 2022 - Present
Challenge
Onboarding is something just about everyone has to go through. We all know, at least on some level, what it feels like to receive a warm, thorough and thoughtful welcome and the opposite. If employees aren't giving a proper onboarding experience, they may struggle to understand their role and how to perform their duties. A poor onboarding process for new hires has been shown to lower productivity, increases inefficiencies, and lead to higher employee turnover.
Outcome
For the initial launch of Welcomary, we focused on creating a warm welcome for new hires while also engaging existing team members. With Welcomary, new hires will feel integrated within the organization and acclimated to their team faster. More importantly, they will be excited, motivated, and informed throughout their career.
Save time, improve productivity, and create an onboarding experience new employees won’t forget.
Welcomary
A Closer Look
My team and I were tasked with creating an app where everyone involved in the onboarding process—new hires, hiring managers, HR and existing team members—get all the information they need, at exactly the right time all in one powerful platform. We worked to offer users an onboarding solution that was comprehensive and easy to understand.
Group Study
For our group study, we interviewed 4 HR representatives to gain insights on what they wanted from an onboarding management platform, what their current onboarding and training process is like, and what pain points they’ve encountered along the way.
After synthesizing trends in their feedback, we heard users saying:
Balancing needs
Feature Prioritization
Since this was the pilot of Welcomary, it was important for us to prioritize our features so that we could establish clear priorities. Together my team and I worked on making informed decisions about what features we found most important and which could wait. This helped us to be better focused and deliberate when designing and building the app.
Key Features
After establishing the features we wanted to move forward with and looking at trends in our research data, we came up with the key features for our onboarding app.
Balancing information with excitement and relationship building makes a good onboarding experience.
Delivery
By combining the principles of agile development with a user-centered focus for the design, we were able to create a practical and functional product in little time. This process required thorough planning and constant communication to ensure that our product was on the right track at all times.
Company Glossary
Welcomary was founded on this very idea — a reference guide that provides employees with the common verbiage used in their business and industry. We created a glossary where users can upload terms with the definition, pictures, and videos so that employees understand and utilize the correct verbiage when analyzing company data.
Team Organization
We felt a break down of teams and their individual pages was one of the most important features — it gives employees an idea of who exactly they'll be working with and what their role is, who their team leads are, and announcements made by the team.
Create Customized Tasks
Users —new hires, hiring managers, HR and existing team members— can create a task complete with specific tags, permissions, and alerts. This way, anyone involved with the task knows exactly what they’re responsible for and when their task is due.
HR and management can assign multiple tasks at once freeing time to focus on employee engagement, retention strategies, and other strategic goals. They can also upload documents, giving their organization a better way to store and manage vital documents and information.
A Comprehensive Dashboard that Promotes Employee Engagement
We designed all the tools employees need to improve their internal communication plan and increase team collaboration. We personalized welcomary’s homepage to communicate everything that’s happening at the company — including announcements, new hire information, easy access to their team pages, and a newsfeed.
Company & Team Announcements
HR and managers can send real-time updates to all employees using the home page and team page to reach their audience. Whether it’s an admin announcing important details about a decision that has a high impact on the business or a manager announcing a new hire, we have them covered!
Employee Directory
We designed an employee directory with visual, intuitive employee profiles making it easier for employees to connect and collaborate. Any user can easily search the directory, connect with employees and teams, and find exactly what they need from where that employee is located on the org chart, team structures, to important employee information
Validating the Final Designs
Updates coming soon! While the app is currently being developed, feedback on the high fidelity prototype and designs for the first release are being conducted through Field Testing at Denver’s Small Business Expo and Denver Start Up Week.
Results & Takeaways
The most important lesson I learned working at a pre-seed was to constantly keep in mind the immediate business needs and goals. My team and I had so many great ideas, but were working with limited time and resources. At an early-stage startup, the most pressing prioritization is organizing features; to figure out what’s the most important metric for the company at present and use design to move that needle forward.