My Hart - Digital Onboarding System
Client
Hartbeach Surfschool Scheveningen
Project type
UX/UI Design
Project duration
February - June 2023
My role and overview ✍
As an independent UX designer, I led a dynamic five-month initiative to create Hartbeach's new digital onboarding system. The project aimed to tackle the challenge of inefficient communication between the surf school's staff and surfers, which led to unpleasant and sometimes even unsafe experiences. Through careful research and user-centered design, I crafted an intuitive solution that streamlined the onboarding experience.
Problem 🕵️
The challenge stemmed from ineffective and inefficient communication between new surf school staff and customers, leading to suboptimal experiences and safety concerns. This arised due to the absence of a digital solution that equips new staff with necessary knowledge and skills. Consequently, customers faced discomfort or unsafe situations. Moreover, a centralized digital platform was lacking for employees to access essential information regarding their roles.
Project Goal 🚩: Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of communication between new surf school employees and customers.
Objective: Create a new onboarding system to streamline the process. Long-term.
Aim: Enhance the surfing experience at Hartbeach, making it more enjoyable and safe for a greater number of customers.
The Process
Organization
To really understand what Hartbeach needed, I dug into the problems they were facing and what they wanted. This made it clear to me that creating a new digital onboarding system was the way to go. I wanted to fully understand the problem and set a clear goal to work towards.
Effectiveness and efficiency
With the goal of optimizing the existing communication process, I conducted desk research to gain insights into the concepts of effectiveness and efficiency. This section presents a report on the desk research I carried out, which focused on exploring the meanings of effectiveness and efficiency within a communication process, along with the factors that could influence them.
These factors were carefully considered throughout the development of the new digital onboarding system:
A clear objective, listening skills, context, feedback, empathy, cultural differences, timing, and tone of voice.
New employees
This research aimed to understand new employees' onboarding experiences and highlight pros and cons of the current process. User needs guided the development of the new digital onboarding system, resulting in three personas. An empathy map captured new employees' emotions, shaping the design process. I did not create a customer journey map due to differing experiences among the three involved employees.
Research
Current onboarding system
This part of my research focused on determining the most effective content to facilitate efficient communication between new employees and customers. Employing in-depth card sorting with the client, I identified crucial content. Additionally, I analyzed elements contributing to effective onboarding systems, aiming to integrate them into the new digital onboarding system for improved communication efficiency.
Elements that played a crucial role in effectively motivating new employees to successfully complete the onboarding process:
Using process bars, motivating by congratulating, the usage of hints/hotspots, CTA’s and gamification.
Including the client in a card-sorting session allowed us to pinpoint essential content that directly addressed the inefficiencies in employee-customer communication. Their active involvement in creating the cards was a crucial step in the process.
During the research, gamification emerged as an uncertain element due to the undefined nature of its implementation. However, two potential approaches for gamification surfaced from the study: assessing new employees through quizzes or awarding points upon task completion to boost organizational productivity. As a result, I formulated two concepts and presented them to the client and the new employees, outlining the pros and cons of each approach and collaboratively selecting a direction with the client's and the new employees’ input.
Concept
During the Design Details phase, I embarked on the detailed elaboration of the initial concept, focusing on gamification through a quiz. I refined and optimized the concept's specifics to arrive at a concrete and effective design. Attention was given to visual aesthetics, interaction design, and substantive elements of the quiz. Furthermore, I incorporated recommendations and feedback provided by the clients and the new employees into the design refinement. During this phase, I developed a style guide, designed a sitemap for screen navigation, and crafted the initial interactive wireframes.
Style guide that matches Hartbeach’s identity:
Design Details
Based on the style guide and the sitemap, I directly designed wireframes to shape functionalities, screen content and conclude the user needs.
During testing, I collaborated with both the target audience and the organization to test the wireframes I had designed (scenarios and think aloud method). This testing phase played a crucial role in the overall design process, as it provided feedback that contributed to optimizing the new digital onboarding system. The objective of this testing was to assess the harmony between various elements, functions, and content, while observing how the test participants navigated through the application.
Some key insights:
Testing
The objective of this project was to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the communication process between new employees at the surf school and customers through the implementation of a new onboarding system, ultimately resulting in a more enjoyable and safer surfing experience at Hartbeach for a larger number of customers in the long term.
Based on the final outcome, I can affirm that this objective has been successfully achieved. The new digital onboarding system encompasses all the elements, factors, and functionalities contributing to the improvement of the effectiveness and efficiency of the communication process.
Make and Realization
In the initial research phase, I discovered that my sub-questions didn't directly align with my central research question, resulting in somewhat unfocused research. Consequently, I couldn't adequately inform the client. After refining the sub-questions, I gained a clearer focus, enabling me to provide the client with strong recommendations in subsequent phases, such as the concept phase.
Throughout the execution of this project, I've gained a profound lesson in self-confidence, learning not to doubt my abilities. I often found myself comparing my work to others and being overly concerned about external opinions. However, this project illuminated the need to shed those insecurities.
Successfully developing a new digital system that garnered enthusiasm and positivity from all involved parties serves as evidence that I am capable of this work independently.