Scrambling to find solution for a problem, with only 2 days left in the weekly sprint. No one on your team can seem to figure it out. What do you do? Who do you turn to? Marion can help! Marion can connect you with the right subject matter experts in your organization, who have been there, done that.
What is Marion?
Marion is a concept desktop and mobile application, created for Best Buy employees, to connect them with the right people within the organization. Whether it is for expertise in a specific area of a project or if they want to find a mentor to help them in their professional development.
How does Marion work?
Marion would connect with the company’s human resource management system to populate employee roles and details. The employees would be able to update their profiles with keywords of their expertise and projects they have been a part of. Similarly, employees can put keywords of area they are currently seeking help in, to get connected with the right expertise.
Why use Marion?
In a big organization, it can be difficult to find people with the expertise you are looking for. Therefore, having a portal where this can be searched would allow employees to easily connect with each other and provide value in their work. Incentives of leveling up based on how many employees you have helped or mentored, would also allow for recognition and encouragement of skill-sharing
A short demo of connecting with an employee with a specified skill-set.
Team “Deezingers”: Ashli Ahn, Brian Cheng, Jared Zecchel, Jill Avis & Shua Baber
The Challenge
This was part of a 24 hour hackathon hosted by Bizhacks UBC. I was in a team of 5, where we were provided with 6 real life problem statements from Best Buy. The challenge our team decided to tackle was:
“As an employee in a large organization, it is difficult for me to find someone working here that has worked on a specific application before or has a specific expertise, or is open for mentorship on a certain topic. It would be great to have a searchable, social way to connect with employees with expertise I need.”
My Role
My primary role included ideation, interviewing best buy employees to understand their existing process, identify gaps and opportunities in that journey and help build user flow of the solution.
Persona
We identified two main types of persona’s to design the solution for:
Journey Map
As we were primarily designers on the team, it was important for us to understand the day to day journey an employee goes through, to better understand the gaps.
Sketching & Wireframing
We discussed various screens and flows during a white boarding session, and refined the sketches into wireframes.
Testing and feedback
In the limited time we had for feedback, we asked the various Best Buy employees that were mentoring at the event to go through our wireframes to ensure feasibility of our idea. Some of the feedback received was:
“Provide an incentive for the employees to use this app.” To incentivize, we decided the app can incorporate a future consideration of gamifying it, to allow employees to level up as they help more people. Our pitch was that this tool can be used towards performance evaluations, as a way to recognize employee efforts.
“Instead of an employee typing up a problem statement, just allow them to search based on keywords.” Updated the search concept design to reflect this.
Style Inspiration
Marion mock up
Desktop view with easy access from the application dock.
It is amazing, how much you can accomplish in 24 hours, working with a team.
It is important to not get stuck on the first idea that comes in our mind. Part of ideation is to keep an open mind and keep exploring different ideas until we can make an informed decision.
Having a structured game-plan with assigned time for each phase helps everyone understand what phase of the work we are in and what is upcoming. Ensuring we stay on track, especially when the timeline is so tight.
As designers, it is really important to understand the technical limitations and constraints. So when we design solutions, they are feasible and can be implemented.