Hike One

For our minor project we were approached by Hike One, a digital design agancy in Rotterdam. They were in the midst of a transition to Holacracy, a system for managing a company where there are no assigned roles and employees have the flexibility to take on various tasks and move between teams freely.

The organizational structure of a holacracy is rather flat, with there being little hierarchy. This meant that there would essentially be noone deciding over an anyones growth and therefore any promotions. We were asked to design a system that would give employees insight regarding growth within their carreer, and that would encourage them to develop themselves as designers.

How can we offer employees insight and challenge with regard to their professional and personal developments within the organization?

MY ROLE
Lead UI Design, user research, concept development

After meeting with and interviewing some of Hike One's employees we had deducted the following set of pains and gains:

Designers find it rewarding to get more responsibility upon expanding their skillset and think it's refreshing to be assigned to different kinds of projects.

Hike One offers it's employees 3 days every year for them to spend on personal/proffesional growth. The people we spoke to however said that it's hard for them to come up with something worth their time. This means it's valuable for us to think about helping them set goals.

Hike One now has coaches within spicific areas of expertise, assigned to assist less experienced employees whenever they need. We heard that employees don't use those coaches to their full potential, because everyone often works on location. This makes the coaches less approachable for smaller questions. Since feedback is essential for personal growth, we should look into providing this in a way that's approachable, but doesn't take up too much time.

I translated those pains and gains into a user journey map which then allowed us to write up the following criteria to keep in mind during our brainstorm sessions:

Our product should encourage Hikers to develop themselves as designers.

It must provide Hikers insight and direction with regard to their professional development and their set goals.

It should clarify what one's role is within the organisation with regard to Holacracy.

It must facilitate Hikers scope to explore personal interests within the field.

It should function as autonomously as possible.

It must be a platform that encourages and facilitates requesting and providing feedback.

We used a variety of brainstorm techniques until we felt confident about three concepts which we presented to the client. They in turn gave us clear directions as to which of those to persue.

So we continued finetuning our concept. When our UX lead provided me with the wireframes it was my task to translate those to a visually pleasing and uniform design.

I experimented with different colors to see if we could emphasise the information architecture and experimented with different maps to ensure that the background wouldn't draw attention from the actual content, while still being an important aspect of our application.

One Journey

Hike One

How can we offer employees insight and challenge with regard to their professional and personal developments within the organization?

After meeting with and interviewing some of Hike One's employees we had deducted the following set of pains and gains:

I translated those pains and gains into a user journey map which then allowed us to write up the following criteria to keep in mind during our brainstorm sessions:

We used a variety of brainstorm techniques until we felt confident about three concepts which we presented to the client. They in turn gave us clear directions as to which of those to persue.

All the screens are visible in this clickable prototype our prototyper made