Skills Radar

Our team set out to design an experience for Managers, Talent Administrators and Executives to observe their team’s skill portfolio and guide individuals to grow in the right ways. The purpose of this collaboration with Offering Management and Engineering was to test our assumptions and measure the level of effort to make our plans a reality.

 
1 tile.png
 

Personae

Managers, Talent Administrators and Executives need to know their current skill gaps to focus learning initiatives and hire for the right skills.

My role

Lead Designer, Design Thinking Facilitator, UX and Visual Designer.

 

Let’s hit pause

I joined the project after it had kicked off, and the first thing we needed to do was hit the pause button to tell a clearer, more convincing story. We gathered feedback on our current recommendation, conducted competitive analysis and researched the current market for skills gap solutions. We found some amazing numbers:

  • According to a recent CareerBuilder survey, $800,000 is the average cost HR managers say they incur for having extended vacancies [due to skill gaps].

  • The skills gap is costing UK businesses more than 2 billion (pounds) a year in higher salaries, recruitment costs, and temporary staffing.

Next, we worked as a team to write new need statements and tell user stories from start to finish. A day in the life of each persona.

DT.png
 

Time to iterate

Once we had all aligned as a team and gathered feedback from all stakeholders, it was time to start creating designs to support our stories. I began with a sitemap to think through the experience for Managers and Executives:

Nav Map Expanded.png

From there, I took key moments from the stories and iterated on the overall design of the experience.

Two main concepts started to take shape:

  1. We developed themes, which were larger collections of skills to help Executives define organizational future vision. Themes (ex: Artificial Intelligence) could be made up of individual skills (ex: Machine Learning, Cognitive Computing, Ethics in AI, Natural Language Classification) and help Executives build clearer focus for their Managers and Employees.

  2. We started to build guidance in to all moments of the experience. To differentiate from all other competitors, we highlighted skill gaps, and also what to do about it.

 

Finalize and socialize

Gathering feedback from users and stakeholders along the way, I moved designs to higher levels of fidelity and crafted a full prototype to communicate functionality. These designs were used to arrive at an accurate level of effort and align the full team.