Guiding employees along their Career Path

Oracle HR

• 5 min read

ROLE

UX Lead

UI Development

COMPANY

Codestream

OVERVIEW

Oracle JAPAC Human Resources and Systems Support Division wanted to provide employees with focused career paths, relevant to their current role. Collaborating with the Oracle team, we developed a bespoke Content Management System (CMS) that is presently being rolled out globally.


INTRODUCTION
Oracle Logo

Our team joined the project shortly after Oracle had produced an internal prototype using Wix. Initially, we were required to expand upon this prototype using their Digital Brand Guidelines and develop the web application. However, before we could progress with the implementation, we acknowledged that the full team needed a greater understanding of both the problem and project goals.


THE PROBLEM

In order to gain more empathy for the users and the business problem, we used a series of short workshops and key stakeholder interviews. We defined a Problem Statement to guide the conversation and prioritised ideas for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

Oracle Problem Statment
Problem Statement Definition

Through these early interactions, we were able to determine a greater shared understanding of the project motivations. After outlining our assumptions, we were able to use this understanding to guide the UX and keep in mind the desired outcome of increasing internal applications.


THE SOLUTION

With clearer picture of the outcomes, we turned our attention back to initial the internal prototype.

Lesson 1.

You can determine many high level usability problems even without the final users of a product.

So far, the prototype had only been reviewed by members on the immediate project team. We needed a fast way to highlight usability issues but our immediate access to users from the Systems Support Division was limited.

UX REVIEW

The team decided to use Lean User Testing methods and review the prototype against heuristics and domain relevant practices. We shared the findings of the exercise in the format of a UX Review. Structuring the results around gaps and opportunities helped the team focus on the project goals and created an open atmosphere where everyone felt they could discuss the risk in the current design.

Oracle UX Review Extract
Extract from the UX Review sharing Gaps and Opportunities

Lesson 2.

Remember, you can always be creative with Technology challenges too.

WIREFRAMING

The UX Review helped the team collectively decide that the content was compelling but the Design needed to be simplified. The Information Architecture needed to better match to the users mental model and the navigation needed to be more intuitive. We used Axure prototypes to test the Design changes and iterated the flow and Architecture based on user and business feedback.

Medium Fidelity Wireframes for Oracle Career Compass

Lesson 3.

The availability and readiness of a Design System directly affects your time to MVP.

UI DEVELOPMENT

After the Architecture was finalised, we had to move directly into Development. I worked with the team creating the User Interface directly in code using the wireframes. We focused on developing a distinctive interface with interactions and visuals that reflected the concept of a journey.

Oracle Interfaces
Oracle Career Compass Interfaces

The experience of designing with code, underlined the importance of having a Design System that is accessible to all teams. The Brand Guidelines provided the core Design principles but not the code of the final components. This meant that everything had to be built from scratch. If the building blocks of the interface were readily available, the wireframes could of been converted to a basic prototype much more efficiently.

REFLECTION

The MVP proved to be a success and Oracle are now rolling out an extended system globally. The timeline forced our team to be creative with both processes and technology.

Adopting lean practices wherever possible was effective but there should have been greater emphasis on our understanding of the users and defining measurable outcomes.

WHAT WOULD I DO DIFFERENTLY?

  1. Finalising the browser support in the early stages of the project would have helped to define interactions and prevented wastage.
  2. Changes happened very close to launch as new stakeholders became involved. I should of highlighted the impact of this during the project kick-off.
  3. I would advocate building any high fidelity prototype or MVP with the components of a Design System.
Oracle Career Compass Tablet