Role: Lead Product Designer

Overview

I've been responsible for the design of Charlie's new diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) product feature-set. In Q3 of 2021, Charlie’s Leadership Team learnt that customers who subscribed to our premium monthly consulting service, HR Advice, were churning due to a lack of additional value in the premium subscription. They believed that offering DE&I solutions would be the best opportunity to address this issue. 

When I was brought onboard, the brief was ambiguous and stakeholders had different ideas about what we should create. My product manager and I had to align our stakeholders and negotiate what the scope would be. From there, I created a feature roadmap, led a team of two designers, conducted user research and delivered designs for a feature set that helped Charlie customers collect and report on the diversity of their companies.

Aligning stakeholders with a feature roadmap

At Charlie, product teams and objectives are reviewed and revised by the leadership team after every 10 week cycle. Throughout the course of this project, the target audience and purpose changed multiple times.

The timeline

• We were constrained to deliver features that could be functional and independent within the 10 week timeframes
  
• Leadership team mentioned that we would likely be given a second cycle if we could present what we would deliver

Scope of the project

• We didn’t know what was actually expected from our team on this project
• Was this a discovery project? Are we expected to ship a product?

We were negotiating for a more specific objective, scope and problem statement during our first week of the cycle which meant we had to condense and negotiate what would be achievable in a smaller (and smaller) period of time.

It was difficult to get stakeholder alignment without concrete outcomes so, informed by the Discovery work that we were doing, I created a Feature Roadmap to help facilitate discussions about what we wanted set out to achieve.

This Feature Roadmap helped to set the business' expectations on what they could expect from the product team and informed our design decisions for how features would fit and function together in the Charlie universe.

Objectives

Ultimately we established that our stakeholders were expecting these outcomes from the product team:

• DE&I as a new software feature with Charlie
  
• Increase value perception of HR Advice for HR Advice customers
  
• Scalable solution to maximise customer impact

Small changes between cycles

Between cycles, the Leadership team wanted to change our objective’s target users from “HR Advice customers” to “Premium customers” to capture a wider audience.

Since Premium customers were a new customer category, designers didn’t have a full understanding of their needs and wants or the nuanced differences between them. This meant that changing paths would interrupt the work we started in the first cycle so we had to re-align on the desired outcomes with all our stakeholders.

While all HR Advice customers were considered Premium customers, not all Premium customers would be HR Advice customers.

We realised that the revision in terminology was driven by the want to reflect work that Sales & Marketing were doing and did not immediately impact what the Product Team was tasked with delivering. 

So to continue our MVP work as planned during the first cycle, I made it clear that this adjustment would need to be something we would look into as part of our first iteration after the MVP shipped instead.

Discovery

Once we’d established our outcomes, we set out to gain a really in-depth understanding of the customer problem. I led my team through a combination of user interviews, desk research and collaborations with DE&I experts to understand how users would ultimately create their company’s diversity strategy.

Interviews with target users identified that there were three main challenges that our users faced within the DE&I space.

Problem #1

Lack of knowledge and confidence

“I don’t feel like I know enough to be talking about DE&I with my team”

“I don’t know what to say about DE&I”

“I’m afraid I’ll do something wrong”

Problem #2

How to approach DE&I

“There isn’t a standard or official approach outlined and a process like this could have a really big impact on our company culture“

“Even just reporting on [protected categories] is really hard to do and it should be simple”

“This is really sensitive information and collecting it informally could be an issue”

Problem #3

Support with DE&I strategy

“I don’t really know how I’m supposed to use the data to shape our [DE&I] strategy”

“I wouldn’t know whether our diversity split is good or bad for a company of our size”

“What would be considered a progressive policy and how do we make sure that the team is doing well?”

Speaking with the wider Charlie team, we decided that the Product Team was best placed to solving Problem #2 at scale while the Product Marketing and HR Advice team would focus on Problems #1 and #3 respectively.

Our research revealed that all companies go through a similar diversity policy development process which led us to conclude that regardless of what other features we decided to create, the first feature we had to create would need to help users set up and collect information on Charlie.

Designing

User Experience Mapping

We took the insights from our discovery interviews and mapped them as part of a diversity data set up, collection, and reporting flow. I then ran a series of workshops and design sessions to figure out how Charlie would standardise the process for collecting diversity data while delivering the most value users. 

There are so many ways that our design decisions could risk revealing vulnerable and private information or leave individuals at risk of being targeted or identified. By mapping the entire User Experience out we could see all of the complexities highlighted and what tradeoffs we could- or couldn’t- make while designing the diversity solution.

The User Journey map also helped explain to stakeholders how complex the solution would be. 

Information Architecture

While the individual DE&I features aligned with different products in the software, the DE&I features all functioned slightly differently than their product counterparts. 

• Settings for collecting team members’ personal information is under Home > Company > Settings but a team members’ DE&I information is slightly different in that it is completely voluntary and anonymous to the company
  
• Team member data can be accessed in real-time through Home > Reports whereas DE&I information would be periodic, anonymised and aggregated information. 

Usability interviews revealed that users struggled to find the diversity features when organised into the IA based on the task (company settings and reports) but they were strongly associated by their overall topic: Company DE&I. So to make the feature set more accessible we created a new item in the hierarchical structure, under Company > Diversity.

Existing behaviour patterns

Our interviews revealed that the users were intimidated by the complexity of this topic and didn’t know where to start. They also viewed Charlie as a trusted and progressive product that could guide them responsibly so we wanted to reinforce this trust by using behaviour patterns and UI components they already knew. I actively sought out existing patterns and interaction flows that are already part of Charlie and looked at how we could adapt them to meet our requirements. 

This process was made easier since nearly all the features had product counterparts but it also presented a new challenge since users already have expectations associated with these behaviour patterns. To solve this we introduced micro-frictions and informative articles to help guide user expectations.

Design Outcomes

Admin user DE&I settings panel

Team Member information form

Diversity section home page

Company Diversity Report

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