EY X SVA NYC Design Competition
EACH OTHERS SKILLS &
EXPERIENCES?
Scope
Role
Concept Development,
UX/UI Design, Researcher
Team
Shuchen Wang
EY Sponsors
Overview
Problem
Ernst & Young is a consulting giant. With over 270,000 employees working in 150 countries, team building, networking, and collaboration across silos is a monumental challenge.
As a part of SVA's Interaction Design MFA program, I had the opportunity to work with EY's Digital Transformation Unit on a semester-long design competition to "create a more unified and connected EY workforce."Our goal was to rethink the way EY aggregates, stores, and shares employee data to:
- Facilitate cross capability collaboration
- Optimize resourcing
- Leverage institutional knowledge
The result of the exercise produced a consolidated employee profile and networking platform appropriately titled, OneEY.
Success
- Winner of SVA's Strategic Innovation in Product/Service Design Case Competition 2019
Project Outline
The Charter
To kick off the project, we set up a stakeholder meeting with our EY sponsors to gain a deeper understanding of the current situation and to frame the problem space in specific terms that we could investigate.
During the meeting, we agreed upon a set of constraints that would serve as a guiding light in the design process. The most crucial being not to create a standalone product. Our sponsors wanted us to optimize current processes and platforms to leverage employee data that currently exists within EY's internal systems.
Research
Primary Research Goals
Before heading out into the field, we synthesized our contextual research and stakeholder insights to establish our primary research goals.
- To learn what cloud platforms exist, their primary use cases, and the possibility of extracting data from said platforms.
- To understand the current player's networking/resourcing behaviors, processes and current pain points.
After reviewing the goals with our sponsors, we identified four target interview participant profiles.
Experience Managers
To understand their current process and pain points in evaluating employees to determine engagement fit.
Directors/Managers
To understand their current process and pain points in evaluating employee performance.
Entry/Mid-Level Employees
To learn how they network, what channels they use and if it is currently possible to discover colleagues based on engagement experience and skills.
Internal IT Managers
To understand the feasibility of integrating data from multiple internal systems.
User Interviews
In collaboration with our sponsors, we translated our current understanding of EY's processes and user goals into interview scripts for each participant segment. In total, we interviewed 9 participants:
- 4 Employees
- 3 Managers
- The Director of Experience Managers
- The Digital Transformation Unit Director
Our overarching strategy was to promote storytelling and to ask the same questions to different user groups -- revealing crucial differences in motivation and understanding.
Synthesis
After coding, clustering, and creating empathy maps for each of our participants, we built the following three documents to communicate our insights to the EY stakeholders.
Problem Definition
Contrary to our sponsor's belief, disorganized employee data was not the real problem. The core issue was that the vast majority of the skills and experience data employees and experience managers desired did not exist.
To create a more unified and connected EY workforce, we would need to re-engineer internal processes, institute new policies, and tear down regulatory barriers.
Problem Spaces
In addition to presenting our overview of the problem to our sponsors, we created an affinity map to communicate the four problem themes.
We designated "employee usability issues" and"guidance/management" as the two areas prime for design intervention because they would require the least amount of regulatory changes and provide the most amount of value to all four user groups.
Ideation
Upon review of our research findings, our sponsors revised the constraints and developed a new series of operating principles:
- Assume there is a proper database of engagement summaries, goals, and deliverables that the platform can access.
- Ignore NDA governance
- Assume employee CV maintenance is tied to performance metrics
In response, we adopted a blue-sky mindset and set out to create an internal networking tool that satisfied all 4 of our user archetype's needs.
How Might We's
Employee Content Creation
How might we make the process of updating CV's less time consuming?
Employee Search
How can we integrate contextual engagement information (experiences) & skills into one easy to use networking platform?
Resourcing Automation
How might we speed up the process of resourcing employees based on their skills and experiences?
User Avatars
The Big Idea
Information Architecture
Co-Design
Validating our Search Architecture
To test our indexing model and the ranking of our search filters, we developed a scenario-driven co-design exercise for EY's Digital Transformation Unit.
We created 4 prompts inspired by our field research:
- Teaming Focus
- Knowledge Seeking Focus
- Mentor Focus
- Collaboration Focus
Each participant was directed to read the prompt and place stickers on the three search filters that would most likely help them discover the individual or asset they were seeking.
What We Learned
Of the 14 people who participated, 66% of the filters selected fell under the categories of engagement experience and skills, which are currently not searchable on Discover EY -- validating the desirability of our new platform.
Low Fidelity Prototype
Profile Patterns
In our redesign of the profile page, we wanted to create a scannable and visual layout that caters to the needs of both Experience Managers and employees.
We chose to adopt the principle "less is more" and design for the average user -- hiding the granular experience-data under the fold.
Lessons Learned
The importance of organizational Design
Working with Ernst & Young for a semester reinforced my belief that technology alone cannot solve institutional problems. More often than not, introducing new software or systems without a proper strategy only makes matters worse.
To create real, organizational-wide change, you must first examine the business as a whole through the lens of design to discover the root of the problem. Only then can you optimize internal and custom-facing processes to support the implementation of technology.
