Employee Events

Our employee intranet, Homeport, was redesigned during 2019. As we continued to test and enhance the user experience, the product team and I would keep a running list of ideas and features that we felt would be useful to our employees. One of these features was centered around employee corporate events and activities.

Research

My product manager and I set up meetings throughout the week with four admins that would be in charge of creating events. We also spoke to employees (full-time and contractors) to get their opinions on the current process.

After discussing their goals and pain points, we ended up with a few takeaways: It's hard for event creators to keep track of attendees, shirt sizes, check-ins, etc. They also don't have an effective way of notifying attendees on changes to the events or reminding them when an event is coming up - all of this is done manually.

On the employee side, they felt overwhelmed with the number of emails they received, most of which were not correctly targeted to them. In the midst of all of the messy communication, their visibility to events they could be interested in diminished. And contractors were unaware that they were allowed to partake in campus events.

Questions, questions, questions

As part of my design process, I like to pose our user problems as questions. This tactic works well when communicating with stakeholders and cross-functional teams because it makes our goals clear. This also kickstarts my ideation phase by forcing me to think in a very user-centric and solution-based way.

1. How might we better communicate to our employees the events and activities happening year-round?
2. How might we allow admins to create events and receive/track attendee information in an efficient and simple manner?
3. How might we increase employee attendance to events across all categories?

"Constructing how-might-we questions generates creative solutions while keeping teams focused on the right problems to solve." - Nielsen Norman Group

Designing the MVP

I started sketching out ideas based on a previous feature I had created for Homeport, called Conference Room Finder. As users had already been exposed to that page's style and information layout, I felt it was the best way to get users to quickly understand how to use events. Content was very similar in how it should be presented as well.

For our MVP, we decided to only show Health & Fitness events since this was the department that had the largest effort in communicating new content every single day. We kept filters very simple, since this would only be targeted to Miami employees.

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We shared the MVP designs with our stakeholders and a handful of employees to get a quick gut-check on the overall experience. We received great feedback and began to work closely with our developers to get this feature live!