Your Career at IBM

Personas

Ethan the Manager: Understand what your employees need and how you can proactively support them. Eva the IBMer: Start your leadership journey and develop your abilities using the curated learning resources.

Current sitemap

Your Career was a team effort that consisted of a number of designers and developers working together. Specifically some my individual projects included designing the high fidelity manager experience featured in the ‘Your Team’ section. I also worked on low-fidelity wireframes, high-fidelity designs and conducting user testing for the skills detail and inference designs found in the expertise section, and the site-wide search found in the global navigation.

‍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.

Site-wide search

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

High fidelity designs

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).

Final Design

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.

‍

Skills Detail and Inference

Problem statements:
IBMers don’t see the value of inference or how it can be used.

Design Prompt:
How might we call more attention to inference scores on skills and entice users to leverage inferred scores when assessing their expertise level? Rather, it should be clear that there is one expertise level per skill, and that there are inferred levels and manager recommended levels which you can apply.

Old design: How might we restructure the old skills detail experience to give more emphasis on the employee's selection and less on the separate tabs.

Wireframes and V1 Designs

My idea was to remove the tabs between Your Level, Inferred Level, and Manager Recommended Level so that it doesn't give off the impression of 3 separate scores.

Initial ideas included:‍

• Differentiate visually between edit and view mode
• Expandable tile cards to view more information on the recommended levels

Wireframes and V2 Designs

• Explore viewing options for learning (use a scrolling modal vs. tabs)
• Moving the ‘about this skill’ the most important information on the page to the left hand column — this is what identifies the skill and aids in recommendations
• More distinguishable activity feed with icons and avatars

User Testing

I test the v2 designs with 7 different users. I asked them to complete 5 tasks and scored each task in order to calculate the NPS.

Final Design

Based on the feedback received, I made several content changes to the final design and renamed the tabs ‘Access’ and ‘Grow’. I also moved the Request Review button to the top section to be more visible. I relocated the skill hierarchy to the top right section, and added tags above the ‘about this skill’. Finally, I altered the visual design to distinguish the editable sections vs. uneditable sections.