Blue Elephant Solutions
3 Product Designers
2 Strategic Partners
2024 (Aug-Sept)
Research, Conceptualization, Testing, Design
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Blue Elephant Solutions is an AI-powered SaaS platform aimed to help companies build employee skills and improve employee training.
HR Managers needed a better way to monitor progress and assign training that matches with employee growth.
I collaborated with two other Product Designers and two Strategic Partners to create and validate a new feature for their existing SaaS platform.
Without this, its hard to help employees identify the skills needed to get promoted or grow in their careers.
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“We don’t know what skills employees are missing"
"It’s tough to guide employees without knowing where they need to grow."
The solution needed to integrate seamlessly with existing workflows and align with the platform's design system.
1. Create a solution that supports existing workflows and is scalable for future growth
2. Maintain consistency with the current design system for quick implementation
1. 1 Month timeline with limited customization options.
2. Niche user base and varying workflows required a flexible yet intuitive solution.
We examined existing skill frameworks like O*NET and SkillsFuture to understand how to track skills, assign training, and support career growth within our feature.
We chose these two frameworks to research because they are both compliant with international standards.
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O*NET helped us link specific skills to job roles, providing clarity on what employees need for each position.
SkillsFuture organized skills into levels and career paths, showing progression opportunities for employees.
I analyzed four competitors: LinkedIn Learning, Oracle, Workday, and Udemy.
Since these are other B2B competitors, I went through the virtual demos provided on their company websites.
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Competitors use visual charts, graphs, and filters to simplify tracking gaps and training.
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Competitors base their recommendations from previous experience rather than interest.
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Frameworks provided a structure to link skills with roles and levels, forming the backbone of our matrix.
Personalization is a key differentiator to support employee growth.
Features like charts and filters highlighted ways to simplify navigation.
Based on our research findings, we held strategy meetings to refine the project’s direction, discuss technical limitations, and establish user requirements. These meetings helped us map out the employee journey and prioritize essential features for HR managers.
From our research we decided that our design must have:
We began to translate our design requirements into sketches and midfi designs. We worked to combine and simplify our designs to create a simple yet intuitive work flow.
After several iterations we were able to simplify our user flow for viewing an employees profile which included their skills and career trajectory as well as assigning training modules to further learn the skills they are missing.
We then created sketches based off of our user flow. From there, we were able to create a more finalized design with our midfi wireframes.
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We ended up removing the button in our initial employee overview and simplifying it by making the entire employee row clickable.
We also ended up removing a lot of the information regarding skills and put more relevant information about the employee.
We decided to enhance the employee profile and include more visuals to gain insights quickly.
This allows HR to check an employee’s information such as their career goals in order to make quick informed decisions without having to navigate to multiple pages.
We made an employee profile that shows progress, highlights skill gaps and tracks training all in one place. This makes it easier for HR to keep up with the employees career growth.
This allows HR to check an employee’s information such as their career goals in order to make quick informed decisions without having to navigate to multiple pages.
Shows individual skills the employee has gained and what skills they can improve on or are missing. This makes it easier for HR to recommend the correct skill training for career growth.
We added a filter, customize column, and search function to help narrow search & assist in navigation based on skills, status, and module.
Participants: HR Professionals Ages 20-50
Participants said:
Before finding the skill competencies tab the users got lost first and ended up on other tabs
Users also got lost when adding a skill level and explained they didn’t understand what skill level meant since there was no explanation.
Creating more noticeable tabs will prevent any additional confusion and create more intuitive navigation
Our feature was presented to our client and has been approved to move forward in development as a scalable and user-centered feature for SMEs to identify missing skill gaps and enhance employee career growth.
This project required a learning curve and deep understanding of skill frameworks before developing our design. We ended up researching how competitors can track their employees skills and recommend them based off of their career growth, linking specific skills to jobs, and how it benefits the company as a whole. Rather than researching all three of these features we ended up narrowing our scope to smaller, actionable sections so we could make realistic progress within our timeline.
During this project, we had the pleasure of working with Blue Elephant Solutions and the greatest part about working with this client was their communication. They gave incredibly detailed feedback during meetings and were also passionate about providing a feature that would benefit their users. This feedback played a huge part in designing a solution that met both their business needs and the needs of the users.
Looking back, I would have also started recruiting sooner for usability participants and advocated for a larger research budget as well so we could gather more feedback and improve the feature of this product even further with more tests and user interviews.
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