Emma WU's Portfolio

introduction

The Blue Line
Leadership Hub

Role UX/UI Design   Team Department of Management   Year 2018-2019

SUMMARY

The Leadership Hub is acting as a portal for knowledge sharing and collaboration, that aims to stimulate leadership development across the United Nations system.

KEY CHALLENGES

Multi Entity Stakeholder,
Minimum Viable Product,
Content Consistentcy and Engagement

DESIGN PROBLEM

Gaining and implementing leadership skills can be hard. We usually listen to XX or going to a leadership training by demand with our work department colleagues. We’ll learn X, Y, and Z that make sense at the moment, but when it comes to implementation the reality is does not match the predefined situation.

Not only the training are being forgotten, sooner or later, the worksheet from leadership training are also being lost in the piles of working files. As part of the Technology and Innovation team on Career Development Department we created a Leadership Hub acting as a portal for knowledge sharing and collaboration, it aims to stimulate leadership development across the UN system. Helping to inspire solutions within the UN working environment.

RESEARCH + PAINPOINTS

We have used the Staff Survey from 2018 to address the current challenges in the management culture and leadership. There are 116 respondents across UN entities and we identify 30 key painpoints and unmet user needs.

Interview quotes

NEW LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT COMPETENCIES

The new Management and Leadership Competency Framework for the Secretariat draws from the eight leadership principles and four ways of working outlined in the UNSLF, as well as the ninth leadership principle given by the Secretary-General. The framework transforms these principles from aspirational goals into measurable behaviours that can be observed, evaluated and developed.

United Nations's competencies

DESIGN EXPLORATION

Landing Page
landing Page mockup
Content Page
interfaces for room choosing

USER TEST + ITERATION

After building a few pages, we sent a survey to ask the previous user research participants to test the flow and the content of our hi-fidelity mockup. The survey included multiple-choice questions, suggestion comment boxes, and semantic differential scale with 7 options between "easy" to "not at all".

The survey came back with all postive feedback. However, I realized that more than half of the participants did not finish their survey. The survey was designed for 10-15 minutes in length and was stated in the invitation email in bold and at the beginning of Survey Monkey to warned about the time needed.

The content page was adjusted to target a shorter requirements in attention span.

MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT

An incident has happened before our physical meeting with one of our key stakeholders. Both of our content team and engineering team was off-board. So we have to quickly redefine our MVP. In the end, we have settled with a WordPress solution with a purchase of a template and merged with our user flow to test launch the 1 phase.

final stage 1 design

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LEARNINGS

Empower organization-first thinking with user-first thinking

To build a learning platform, it was critical to work with the organizational deliverable needs and user needs. We vision the project to have multiple entities involved, but each entity’s annual deliverables are not publicly shared. Through a series of reaching out to different departments, we not only informed them about the project, but also better aligned organizational needs with user needs.

React to unexpected limitations and sudden events

Things does not always go how we planned, but problem does not have to be solved in one single way too. Communication and flexibility are the key to problem solving. I learned to rapid problem solve in and have quick turnarounds in sudden situations.