Facilitation management tool

In the Customer Service leadership development team, leaders also teach. These Leaders as Teachers facilitate the team’s programs, while program managers schedule the sessions and make sure each one has a primary and a back-up facilitator.

I was the UX designer on the project, from discovery to launch. I researched the existing process, defined the users and their needs, designed the tool, tested it, and turned the findings into prioritized recommendations for the first release, which launched as a minimum viable product (MVP).

As an enterprise tool used across the organization, it had to meet accessibility requirements, and I accounted for accessibility throughout the design.

One place to sign up, manage sessions, and spot gaps.

Every program had its own sign-up process.

I started with a discovery meeting with a program manager, then read the product brief, reviewed feedback program managers had gathered in one-to-one conversations, studied the existing sign-up sheets, and checked whether a similar tool already existed. It didn’t, so a dedicated tool was needed.

As of October 2022, 84% of Leaders as Teachers were certified for more than one program, so they could get up to four different sign-up emails in a week. Signing up took 2 to 4 minutes.

Mixed messages. Each program and session had its own sign-up process, and requests came from different team members.

Manual calendars. Leaders as Teachers blocked their own calendars, and reminders were sent by hand, which led to mistakes.

No single view. Leaders as Teachers had to check their calendar invites to see which sessions they had signed up for.

Admin follow-up. Program managers sent invites one by one and kept checking the sheets to see if anyone had withdrawn.

The tool had two kinds of users, with connected responsibilities.

Every sign-up ran through shared spreadsheets and manual e-mails, with work for both the program managers and the Leaders as Teachers.

I moved from hand-drawn sketches to wireframes, a low-fidelity prototype, and then a high-fidelity prototype.

The information was there. The urgency wasn’t.

I invited 20 Leaders as Teachers to test the home and sign-up pages, and 9 from five countries took part. On the admin page, 8 of 9 program managers I invited took part, from Costa Rica, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I also ran 18 one-to-one interviews with Leaders as Teachers and program managers.

Users felt a website was a big improvement on the old sign-up process. I turned every finding into a recommendation with a risk level and a priority, so the team could decide what had to ship first.

P0, critical: the sign-up button, primary and back-up labels, a clearer time on each card, and the urgent-requests heading.

P1, moderate: a month or quarter view, and a visible re-send invite option.

P2, nice to have: updated hero images, clearer confirmation messages, and a link to the help wiki.

On the admin page, 6 of 8 program managers found the cancel option hard to find. Moving it into the edit flow, a confirmation before canceling, an activity log, and a job level filter were all moved to the next version, so the first release could launch on time.

The first release, shaped by testing.

The final designs added the boxed urgent-requests description, icons and role labels on every session card, re-send invite and request withdrawal options, a highlighted Session Sign-up button, a clearer confirmation message, and on the admin page, an edit option for facilitator logins and an info icon explaining each session status.

The same journey, with the manual steps taken out.

Learning technologists and a developer built the tool. I handed off prototypes in Adobe XD and Figma, starting in Adobe XD and moving to Figma once I had access to it.

Less coordination behind the learning.

The tool launched on 17 October 2023. Signing up now takes 30 to 60 seconds instead of 2 to 4 minutes, and program managers’ weekly coordination fell from 18 hours to 8.

By the end of 2023, facilitation favorability rose from 57% to 89%, close to the 90% target. In the post-launch survey, 75% of Leaders as Teachers rated session sign-up easy or extremely easy (4.25 out of 5), and 100% said the same about finding their upcoming sessions (4.75 out of 5).

This was a product-level result, delivered with learning technology, business intelligence, and product partners.

What I took from it.