.png){kind=small}
UX RESEARCH | UX DESIGN
Elevating Employee Onboarding
Innovative AI-powered solution for an employee-centred onboarding experience
Role: User Researcher, Experience Designer & Product Designer
Timeline: 14 weeks
Client: NEC America
CONTEXT
NEC America is a pioneer in using technological innovations to create long-lasting change.
NEC America, A Japanese tech conglomerate that creates innovations to improve safety, efficiency and security. They wished to focus on leveraging AI to create innovations in the space future of work.
BRIEF
A service for the Future of Work leveraging Artificial Intelligence to create work engaging and exciting.
SOLUTION
Preeby
An AI-Buddy that provides an interactive experience to new hires focusing on collaboration, reduced exhaustion and social interaction.
Guided onboarding experience.
Reducing exhaustion
Using Preeby, the employee is able to onboard seamlessly by spending less time on paper-work and more on socializing and understanding company cultur
AI recommending work breaks
Reducing exhaustion
Preeby uses advanced AI to detect from employee’s voice their stress level and gives recommendations to take break.
Fostering Social Interactions
Opportunities for connecting
-
Preeby, on the basis of mutual interests and hobbies, recommends people to connect with.
-
Impersonating in- person casual socializing, users can broadcast messages to make plans.
Visualizing Journalists as Community Builders using craft materials
Fostering Connections
Encouraging collaboration
Employee specifies the kind of help they need & and Preeby crawls the employee dataset giving recommendations of people to meet with.
Preeby, smartly suggests common times to meet as well on the basis of calendar availability.
APPROACH
Using a design-thinking approach, I led research including 6 interviews, a card-sorting exercise, and a survey with 1500 responses. Analysis and synthesis crystallized problems, needs, and design principles, incorporating methods like customer journey and activity mapping. Ideation followed, exploring opportunities through customer journey and reverse brainstorming. The project underwent 3 rounds of prototyping, informed by feedback from 12 stakeholders.
I actively contributed to UI design and customer journey mapping.
RESEARCH PLAN
When remote, it feels more like a task for senior managers to help junior hires… I still don’t feel I'm being useful to the company because I’m still in the process of figuring things out…
-Newly hired junior employee
INSIGHT #1
Lack of trust and support between employees and employers negatively affects productivity and wellbeing
INSIGHT #2
Employees increasingly feel exhausted, socially isolated and face a lack of communication amongst peers and employers.
INSIGHTS #3
Lack of communication, social isolation and exhaustion stems from a poor onboarding experience and continues building beyond that.
How might we make onboarding an integrative and enjoyable experience that facilitates networking, socialization and collaboration?
IDEATION
Mapping opportunities for improvement in the onboarding experience.
-
Personalized onboarding experience matching the new hire's interest.
-
Early days of onboarding to foster new connections and sustain communications.
-
A mix of digital and physical touchpoints to engage employees.
Ideating different audience types and the outcomes they can achieve with Solutions Content
Curating a more personal, collaborative and less exhausting onboarding.
-
Reducing redundant information at Day 0 with AI parsing employees' information from resumes and other sources like social media etc
-
Exciting goodies based on personal interests during pre-boarding.
-
​Ex- An employee who loves hiking gets a hiking coupon.
-
-
A digital AI buddy for making connections with people based on similar interests for socializing and networking.
-
Reducing exhaustion by prompting breaks using intelligent voice analysis.
PROTOTYPING
Different fidelity prototypes to seek feedback and refine solution.
"Let's ditch the corporate feel and embrace a more natural interface. Why not make your platform social, fun, and inviting? That's where your unique value lies!"
- Dean, IIT Institute of Design
IMPACT
The project is extremely well thought out. It is easily something that NEC can build and scale up on. The subtle integration of AI and having an onboarding buddy seems impactful to tackle the issue of Zoom fatigue.
- NEC America Spokesperson