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mfaithlee@gmail.com
Michelle Lee © 2024
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Your Career at IBM is a platform for IBMers to help manage their skills and career growth at IBM. Employees will be empowered to plan their journey, build their skills, and grow their careers with clarity and purpose.
Since launching our MVP in 2020, we had not gone through any major design changes. Following our lowest-recorded NPS in early 2023, we decided to listen to our users and give Your Career a much needed update.
Problem statement: As an employee, I do not know where to start in Your Career. The features are overwhelming and disjointed with little guidance about how to make the most of the tool.
My Role:
• Wireframes and high-fidelity exploration of the Welcome page
• Wireframes and exploration of the Career Profile, Growth Guide features
• Low-fidelity wireframes, high-fidelity designs and conducted user testing for the Career Interviews and Portfolio sections
• Site-wide search found in the global navigation
Eva the IBMer:
• A landing page that takes her on a journey
• Step by step highlights on how to get to desired role/band
• Provide a career roadmap, which is tied to learning for each profession within IBM
• Clear understanding of what are the requirements for a promotion
Ethan the Manager:
• More power to promote individuals
• Build a team dashboard to understand how team skills come together for a high performing team
Leading with Design Thinking
Scaling the IBMer and manager experience in Your Career. Hopes reveal managers’ expectations about the experience. Fears reveal managers’ doubts about using the tool.
We started off by simplifying the sitemap and navigation from 22 pages to 12 pages. Our goal was to prioritize the most important features so that our users will immediately know how to make the most of the tool.
Simplify: We wanted to simplify the onboarding and usability experience - especially for new users to help navigate the tool.
Personalize: We wanted to personalize skills and learning to provide IBMers with the opportunity to improve their progression.
Guide: We wanted to guide users with helpful insights based on each stage of their career.
This is our new welcome page. We personalized the experience depending on where you are in your career journey. There is a clear explanation of each feature and how it helps you in your role to excel in your career.
We wanted to frame this new concept of a career profile to capture any essential skills, learning, and experience all in one view.
IBMers have a clear career workflow so that they know what to expect and what steps they need to take. Here expertise is broken down into skills that they have, and skills that they want to grow, in order to identify skill gaps and explore new learning opportunities.
Still within the career profile is the growth guide. This feature shows relevant skills and learnings that are tied to each role at different band levels. Expanding each skill gives further learning recommendations tied to role requirements.
Framed as a portfolio of experience, this feature can empower the IBMer to be in charge of their career journey when leveraging their expertise and experience for promotions.
Problem statements:
As a user I want to be able to search on jobs and understand the generic dynamics.
Design Prompt:
Currently there's no experience at IBM that would allow users to search on job profiles to understand the dynamics of the job.
Brainstorming for low-fidelity designs. I explored the following ideas:
• Filter menu on the left hand side
• Quick links and search description
• Aggregated recommended list at the top
• Tags to categorize results
I translated my low-fidelity ideas to the next level. I played around with the concept of the search bar in the navigation and looked into:
• White tiles to sort search results
• Overflow menu to view more information
• Sections to categorize and organize results
• More results button beneath every section
How would users interact with this feature?
Since this search bar will be a primary entry point for many users, I worked the design into the top navigation. It was important that it remained aligned with the Carbon Design System (Grey 100 theme).
Ultimately, I decided on this final design because it best represented the look and feel of a simplistic search engine, while remaining aligned with our current Your Career patterns. I removed the white tiles for simplicity, and reconfigured the search results to span the full width of the page.
