Employee Benefits Portal

Objective

As part of their digital transformation, an HR tech company wanted to create the next-generation employee portal experience. The existing portal had low employee engagement and satisfaction, and users voiced frustration with the poor usability and uncertainty with decisions around their benefits. The new employee portal design aimed to proactively guide employees to engage or make decisions with their benefits through personalized recommendations and actionable messaging.

Role

• UX research

• Design thinking sprint planning and facilitation

• UX design

Process

Research

To understand the current site experience and user problem, I collected research from customer care feedback, post-visit site surveys, client feedback, and site analytics, which uncovered the following:

• Users are overwhelmed with the amount of content on the site and find the info unclear

• Due to the unclear info, users don't feel confident whether they're making the right decision

• Analytics reveal low site engagement, including low monthly repeat visits and low click-rates on key messaging areas on the homepage 

Design Thinking Sprint

I planned and facilitated a 5-day design thinking sprint with product managers, stakeholders, business partners. To gain end user perspectives outside of the organization, sprint participants also included 4 employees outside the organization. Key learnings from the sprint included:

• The problem: The end user participants validated problems surfaced from the upfront research. They also voiced concerns of not knowing where to start in the benefits decision making process due to clunky navigation or lack of benefit awareness.

• Top values: Employee end users valued personalized, relevant info, proactive guidance, and peace of mind in an ideal benefit portal experience.

• The user: 3 types of user archetypes emerged:

  • The fixer upper, who has a specific issue (financial, health, etc.) to address or improve

  • The optimizer, who is generally on top of their benefits but wants to make the most of the offerings provided by their employer

  • The crockpot, who likes the status quo but can be persuaded to make a change as long as they're certain that the change will positively impact them

Design & Iterations

To prioritize the key features of the new employee portal design, I collaborated with product managers and other designers on the project. The main features were:

• Benefit awareness section to surface offerings that users may find useful but not know about

• Required actions to call out high-priority items

• Personalized, actionable suggestions to guide users with benefit engagement

• Shortcuts for easy access to frequently visited pages within the portal

To validate design concepts, I conducted moderated user testing sessions and continued to iterate based on user pain points and stakeholder feedback. Key feedback and iterations were:

• Users found the awareness section engaging and familiar, as the design leveraged the social media pattern of stories. Stakeholders wanted to add more descriptive labels including a headline and call-to-action for each item in the section, but users found the copy overwhelming. To balance the user and stakeholder feedback, design was updated to incorporate more descriptive, yet concise, labeling to provide more context to each awareness item.

• When users saw several high-priority items, they weren't sure what to tackle first. The required action designs were updated to include due dates and icons to indicate differing levels of priority.

• Users had mixed feelings of seeing personalized recommendations up front before being able to access the homepage. The design consequently integrated the recommendations contextually within the homepage.

Throughout the design process, the design system underwent several iterations, and all wires were updated with the most up-to-date design system components.