NavDeck Onboarding

Designing an adaptable + expandable onboarding system for an AI skillsets-management platform

Project Scope

Product Design, UX Research, UI Design System, UX Writing, User Testing, Prototyping

Role

Lead Designer

Duration

2 Weeks, Mar 2023

Market Analysis

NavDeck was founded with the mission to provide mid to large-sized companies with personalised career frameworks to optimize their employees’ growth.

Traditionally, HR teams relied on scattered spreadsheets and generic surveys to track employee growth. Not only was this tedious and messy, but it also failed to understand the individual career goals and gaps of each employee.

Understanding the individual needs of every team member helps drive collective success. There was an opportunity to reform the skillsets landscape in a way that is a win-win -- where employees can track their individual career growth and employers can drive internal mobility among high-performing employees.

Personal Challenges

My role and the challenges that came with it:

I was the sole product designer for this project. Not only was this my first product design project fresh out of General Assembly bootcamp, but it was also the team’s first time working with a product designer.

I initiated new UX processes among the product, dev, and business teams to ensure that user needs are taken into consideration. This included setting up UX logs to track, analyse, and prioritize the numerous feedback from the team and users during user tests.
I set up an adaptable design system to meet speedy UI deadlines, which eventually expanded into future branches of the product to ensure brand consistency.
A personal challenge I faced was the steep learning curve from working with a new industry. To overcome this, I squeezed in user research at every available opportunity, including initiating user interviews and tests and conducting market research to get a better understanding of the industry.

Goals

Business Goals

Create an adaptable onboarding flow to expand into future products

NavDeck’s overarching brand mission was to improve strategic workforce planning through the use of AI-enhanced technology. They plan to debut this skillsets management platform as a springboard that’ll eventually expand into various product branches down the line.

User Goals

Reduce technical debt for HR managers

To get things off the ground, HR managers had the enormous task of onboarding their company’s entire employee database onto NavDeck’s platform. My job as a Product Designer was to ensure that this process was as smooth as possible to familiarize them with the skillsets mapping system.

Customisable career pathways for each organisation

According to NavDeck’s existing client base, some companies had existing career frameworks they wished to onboard, while other companies had no career frameworks and wanted to use NavDeck’s platform to start building one for their employees. The platform had to be customisable enough to cater to both camps.

Project Task I: Shortening the Onboarding flow

Problem

The current flow did not correspond with how companies were internally structured

User testing and competitor analysis revealed that the "Departments" section was a major pain point. HR teams had to upload all employee data and then manually assign each employee to the correct department, which was especially tedious when dealing with larger numbers of employees.

However, user feedback revealed that HR admins often delegated department onboarding to department heads. This made the manual grouping step unnecessary, as department heads were already responsible for managing their own teams.

Approach

Allow room for task delegation

Instead of requiring HR admins to upload the full employee database and subsequently group them, I made it so that HR admins would first create several empty departments, and then could invite each department head to fill in their respective employees individually.

This removes the burden from a singular HR admin and aligns with existing delegation workflows in larger companies.

Impact

Better alignment with real-world workflows

Matches how organizations naturally delegate onboarding tasks

Easier to remove and edit employees

Employees can now be added or removed by job role and department. Previously, the only way to do this was to search up their name or email in the entire company list.

Scalable from small to big companies

No matter how big the company is, this new flow allows HR teams to divide employees into bite-sized departments (and teams in the future) for easier management

Project Task II: Reducing error rates when uploading documents

Problem

The existing CSV uploading process was too complicated and had too much room for error

Users had to upload two separate CSV files:

Both required a “Job Title” field, which had to match exactly (including capitalization and spacing). Any spelling inconsistencies (e.g., "UXUI Designer" vs. "UX/UI Designer") caused errors, leading to skillsets not being mapped correctly.

Users easily encountered errors when duplicating the CSV fields across both spreadsheets. However, the system was unable to flag out these errors as it couldn’t differentiate between typos and genuinely different job roles.

Not only that, but users were also overwhelmed by the sheer amount of input fields they had to fill up in the 2nd CSV, leading to a lot of confusion.