Maintaining and modernizing productivity

The goal of the General Electric’s Workplace Portal is to allow employees access to work essentials and assist with manager autonomy on managing their team’s needs.

GE needed the manager experience for the GE’s Workplace portal to approve and/or decline requests from members of their team.

As a Sr. UX Interaction Designer…

I optimized and introduced new processes so that 300,000 employees can request provisions for work, including, computers, accessories, mobile services, and software. I designed the UI, following GE”s brand but modernizing it to follow universal patterns.

I was responsible for designing, prototyping and testing concepts and collaborate with the product and engineering team for its development and adoption.

“How can I best manage my teams needs with out being a bottle neck.”

Mission:

• Create a solution to speed up the request and approval process for laptops, cellphones and other provisional requests

• Design the manager experience on GE’s digital workplace portal

• Design and test visuals for desktop and mobile

Manager’s workflow is visceral and intuitive

Revamping the information architecture

Through some analysis of the navigational structure, I uncovered many duplications of pages and multiple ways to access very important areas of the website. With some IA testing, I was able to identify the most intuitive content structure that represented the goal of the web app.

Areas of confusion:

• Employees did not understand how to request items because were not sure what their teams’ required

• Approval flow delayed shipments due to inefficient legacy processes

• Manager’s were not confident in leading new hired due to bottle necks

Evolution of the approval layout

Initial wireframes

Various considerations to show which items required action. Pending approvals hierarchy ended up being displayed at default within a 3 tab panel.

Bringing the right concepts to life on mobile

Success Metric:

• Saved 60% in inventory budget

• Manager visibility to teams requests

• Reduced support tickets for one-off requests

• All employees requested accurate devices for their needs and responsibilities

Next steps

User interviews to learn about expectations

When speaking with managers from different areas of the business we learned that accessing the approval workflow was expected to be on desktop and on mobile. The approval process happens during working hours and managers will be on their laptops. Allowing managers to make action to their team’s needs on their laptops allows for a quicker interaction.