METHOD, INC.
Building a quiz feature to boost employee
engagement and career development
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TEAM
21 interns:
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7 product managers
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7 software engineers
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4 product designers
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3 experience designers
TIMELINE
Summer 2024, 6.5 weeks
ROLE
Experience Design Intern
CONTEXT
We created a tool to boost employee engagement and encourage career development.
Background
Last summer, I interned as an experience designer at Method, a digital product consultancy. One of their clients, a large engineering firm, had recently launched an internal learning platform called LMS.
What is LMS?
Currently, LMS hosts videos and articles designed to encourage skill-building and career development. Managers create and publish content, and other employees consume this content.
What's the problem?
While testing the initial version of LMS, our client noticed low user engagement. They asked Method's interns to develop a quiz-taking feature to address this.
PROJECT OBJECTIVE
How might we design a quiz-taking experience to boost engagement and facilitate learning?
When outlining the problem, our client hypothesized that competition would drive engagement. To test this assumption, we conducted interviews with prospective LMS users.
USER GROUPS
We knew our solution needed to serve two users:
Employees
Managers
Assigned to complete courses
and quizzes to improve their skills
Responsible for creating
quizzes and reviewing results
USER INTERVIEWS
Our interviews uncovered tensions between our client, managers, and employees.
Managers wanted detailed data and metrics about employees' progress.
But employees wanted privacy and anonymity. Notably, many of them actually didn't like the idea of competition in the workplace.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
How did we navigate these tensions?
Drawing from our research, I first created a list of design principles to guide our work.
01. Intuitive interface
Simple and intuitive interface that eliminates complex onboarding
02. Bite-sized learning
Content broken down into manageable, focused chunks
02. Insightful metrics
Meaningful, team-focused metrics that aren't invasive
04. Gamification for personal growth
Gamification reframed as a way to promote personal growth
PROJECT OBJECTIVE - REVISITED
With these insights, we revisited our project objective.
Sharing our findings with our client helped them reframe gamification as a tool for personal improvement, rather than a synonym for competition - a shift which we believed would foster genuine engagement.
DESIGN PROCESS
With just 4.5 weeks left, we needed to ideate quickly.
Here are some of the steps we took to ideate and align across seven designers, four disciplinary areas, and three scrum teams.
Feature prioritization
The designers and engineers collaborated on this effort vs impact matrix to help us prioritize our ideas by feasibility.
Low-fi wireframes
We created low-fi wireframes using Method’s own design system Paperkit.
Design system management
As we transitioned into high-fi designs, I built a number of components for the intern team.
DESIGN-TO-DEVELOPMENT HANDOFF
The design-to-development handoff
(or handshake as it’s called at Method)
Due to the tight timeline, our design to development handoff was very iterative and collaborative.
As soon as we completed wireframes, we shared them with our engineers, so they could start working on the backend database structure early. Likewise, we handed our hi-fi designs over on a rolling basis.
DESIGN DECISIONS
So what did our final MVP look like?
I'm going to walk through three key design decisions on the employee side of the platform, as this was my particular focus.
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01. Multiple choice questions for quick, bite-sized learning
We included four types of quiz questions, all of which prioritize bite-sized learning to avoid disrupting employees' workdays.
Type 1
Basic multiple choice
Type 2
True / false
Type 3
Fill in the blank
Type 4
Two truths and a lie
02. Gamification in the form of personal progress tracking
Employees earn points by completing questions and see their progress in the form of a bubble chart, private to their account.
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03. An optional leaderboard for employees who enjoy competition
To personalize the learning experience, employees can opt to display their scores on an anonymized, company-wide leaderboard.
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04. Insightful, anonymized metrics that prioritize employee privacy
All data is anonymized and aggregated before being sent to managers, and only the most important metrics are shown.
Employee View
Post-quiz results page
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Manager View
Aggregated results page for a specific quiz
OUTCOME
30,000
Over
employees and managers will use this quiz feature.
Our quiz feature is set to be integrated into an upcoming version of LMS, which will be used by over 30,000 employees worldwide.
REFLECTION
Learning how to create structure from chaos:
Throughout the internship, I met with many product and experience designers at Method, including my amazing mentor Olivia Fitzpatrick. Their support and expertise was crucial in helping our team maintain alignment and introducing me to new design frameworks and techniques.
Reflecting on this experience, here are a few key challenges we faced and the insights I gained through them.
Making decisions quickly with a large team was challenging
In retrospect, nominating a product owner or primary decision-maker might have sped up the feature prioritization process.
Maintaining alignment across seven designers (and four disciplines) was not easy
Establishing and sticking to routines was the key to create structure from chaos.