Research, Product Design, Design Strategy
Toyota is a Japanese multinational automotive manufacturer, building and selling vehicles and services in the US as Toyota Motor North America. While there, I helped lead the product design of their first mobile employee experience management system. As part of this effort I created a design system, established visual and interaction standards for the app, and helped craft and conduct research to validate our team’s hypotheses. The project operated out the Advanced Technologies Group at TMNA.
The goal of this project was to create a scalable mobile platform for TMNA employees to access their most important information regarding their life and employment relationship at Toyota. TMNA HQ was the pilot location, with later releases expanding to manufacturing sites and service facilities across the country.
The Challenge
Design a scalable mobile Team Member Engagement platform that would enable Toyota employees to easily access and act on key information regarding their employment and benefits with Toyota.
My Role
I was the Lead Product Designer for this project, in a team that included a Product Lead, a front-end developer and a data scientist.
Research and Ideation
This project began when an HR senior leader requested that our group build a chatbot application to help employees get answers to commonly asked questions regarding their employee benefits. The HR intranet portal was quite cumbersome to navigate and accessible only via desktop and suffered from a distinct lack of engagement and employee frustration. A better solution was needed.
My first engagement with this project was helping conduct user research to uncover what our team members expected from their relationship with Toyota, and how we could bridge that gap. The research process was a joint effort between myself and our Product Lead; I helped define collection procedures, analysis methods and acted as a human centered design consultant to ensure we were asking the right questions.
I conducted:
Multiple card sorting exercises with employees
Feature ideation workshops with senior leadership
Competitive analysis
Data analysis of quantitative data collected via surveys and card sorts
App Design v1 - Beta Test
This first iteration of the Team Member Experience app (TME) was very simple: it was a chat interface that used the Microsoft Azure Bot Service to connect to the HR Q&A database, Employee Vehicle Lease Program (an employee benefit that affords them a Toyota or Lexus lease at a deeply discounted rate), and facilities services database hosted in Sharepoint, as well as a feedback request form that enabled employees to submit instant feedback via the app regarding feature requests and bugs, and collected data to allow us to perform sentiment analysis.
We chose the first several features to be tested due to the easy accessibility of that data to the chatbot API:
Requesting the employee’s vehicle insurance
Requesting when the vehicle’s state inspection is due
Parking spot availability
Manager car wash availability
I also designed an onboarding flow to ensure we established clear user expectations for what the app could and couldn’t do. The beta version of the app was released for testing to around 500 users in the Plano HQ campus.
Design System - v1
As we continued gathering feedback from users, the project focus began to shift into scalability. One of the requirements we identified was the need to make the app as immune to future tampering as possible; that is, we needed to establish design and content standards that could empower content creators from across the company while still maintaining governance and guardrails for future designers to expand on the platform.
To that end, I began working on a design system that would enable our teams to achieve these objectives. The creation of this design system was done mostly in parallel with the app design process. Deliverables included:
Typography standards
Color standards
Layout standards
Creation of all necessary mobile interaction components (buttons with states, fields, input components, content cards, elevations)
App Design - v2
Based on our findings, we continued iterating on the app design, with the distinct goal of presenting to Executive Leadership our full vision for the product.
Employees were primarily interested in 3 broad categories of engagement, information and access:
What is happening in Toyota as whole;
What is happening on my campus;
What is happening with my employment relationship.
After conducting an information architecture card sorting exercise with several groups of employees, we organized the app across these 3 main categories. Designs were tested several times throughout the iteration process to ensure user adoption.
You can view the interactive prototype here.
Some of the features included in this design were:
Finding and booking an available meeting/conference room
Requesting time off
Finding locations across campus
Cafeteria menus
Outcomes
After the initial designs were delivered, we engaged with Accenture to provide design and development resources and take on additional UI exploration and development, while the product lead and I focused on expanding the product and design strategy, which included advanced AI services, access for employees across all of our manufacturing sites, and expanding the platform into physical spaces through new touchpoints.