PERSONA SENTIMENT DASHBOARD

Roles & Responsibilities

  • UX Lead

  • Design Thinking Facilitator

Project Facts

  • Industry: Oil & Gas

  • Design System: MS Fluent UI

Skills Used

  • Workshop Facilitation

  • Prototyping

  • Design Thinking

Deliverables

  • Personas

  • wireframes

  • Interactive Prototype

Turning employee survey data into actionable Insights.

This case study covers an effort as the UX Design Lead, alongside 3 Advisory Consultants, with Orbital Oil to prototype a sentiment analysis dashboard for internal HR teams. As the only UX resource, I designed this interactive mockup as a north star vision that illustrates how Surveys and Employee Personas can be used to inform company initiatives.

Problem Statement

How to Engage an Estranged Workforce

Have you ever taken a survey? Did you ever find out what happened to your response afterwards?

Orbital is a global Oil Field Services company that prides itself in its company culture. With less than 2,000 employees world-wide, they have been able to grow organically while staying true to their core values. To keep a pulse on the employee experience at Orbital, the HR department leads a yearly effort to gauge sentiment and performance. Coordinating thousands of survey responses takes weeks and months to analyze, so the turnaround time from feedback to action is very slow. They would like a way to gather feedback from their employees more often, but they currently don’t have established processes to request, receive and digest all of that data. As a main deliverable, our team proposed a dashboard built on low-code Microsoft Power Platform that would house up-to-date sentiment metrics throughout the year. To add empathy to the data to avoid workers feeling like just a number, we proposed interviews to create Personas for 4 distinct user groups.

Methodology

Defining the Vision

Before breaking ground on deliverables, we ran a two hour workshop with the client’s Chief HR Officer in the office to define their metrics of success. We started by listing metrics and behaviors that Viva Insights tracks by default, and then asking the HR team “What behaviors do we want to encourage going forward? What behaviors do we want to discourage?”

They then wrote their ideas in a narrative format that would help us empathize with the real-world employees that they represented. Once everyone added their sticky notes under the relevant behavior(s), it was clear that the workshop participants had the most to say about 3 business objectives:

  1. Inclusive Leadership

  2. Speak my Mind

  3. Manager Communications

The workshop readout informed our advisory strategists to center their data and sentiment analysis around those 3 objectives. The other themes that did not receive as many sticky notes would not be lost, but rather be added to an Experience Backlog that the HR team could re-visit after the MVP phase was completed.

User Research

Due to the fast-paced nature of this project, we treated the first 6 weeks as a planning block for subsequent projects. We had access to the HR team in Houston, but the client’s employees are worldwide from Offshore Oil Field workers in Malaysia to Onshore Office Workers in North Dakota. Usually designs are inspired on user research in early phases of the project, but we didn’t have the time or resources allocated to interviewing employees (neither remotely nor in-person).  To avoid standing still, I proposed an unconventional method: We would categorize Orbital’s ~1,800 employees into 4 main groups, then we could interview members of those groups in the next phase of the project. These served as Employee Archetypes: 1.) Offshore Operations, 2.) Onshore Operations, 3.) Advanced Engineering, 4.) Support Functions

The plan was to interview individuals and learn more about their day-to-day experiences as the project progressed into future phases. From that detailed lens, we could create Persona Profiles under the Employee Archetypes. Since the Project Plan for this initial phase did not allow for interviews with real-world employees, I drafted a Persona template that the HR team could use as a future state vision. With the permission of the client, we used Microsoft CoPilot for Business to generate content to fill an example of a Persona.

The persona we chose was the “Onshore Operations”. To highlight the fact that this was a proto-persona with generated content, we called them “Illustrative Personas.” These would have to be validated once we had the opportunity to interview actual employees and end-users. (Persona template example shown below)

Archetypes & Proto-Personas

My Persona template includes context into what a day in the life of the worker might look like. The intent was to embed these personas front and center into the Sentiment Dashboard for the HR team. That way, the Persona research would always be at arms reach whenever the HR Office needed a reminder about the employees who would be impacted by their policies.

This would allow us the flexibility to either categorize Personas under those archetypes, or we could reassign them to an archetype that might be more appropriate. If we stumbled upon an employee role that did not fit under any of the archetypes, we would have the option to create a net new archetype that was not captured in the original 4 groups.

Outcomes & Impacts

By the end of this project, we were able to:

Facilitate an in-person Design Thinking Envisioning Workshop

1

Identify 4 Employee Archetypes & Personas

2

Propose 3 key Business Objectives that the HR team could measure to track engagement & culture

3

Provide a Strategy for the HR team to extract rich insights from their yearly employee Surveys

4

Build an interactive dashboard in Figma showing the MVP experience

5

Delivered recommendations for which Microsoft VIVA Insights indicators could be tracked to employee behaviors

6

From this project, we built the foundation for Orbital Oil’s HR Office to survey their employees more frequently. The dashboard and Persona templates serves as an MVP they can validate and expand on as they have the ability to interview their employees. Now, their yearly surveys will provide alot more real-time insights into how workers are experiencing the culture at Orbital. And by designing the dashboard experience in a way that revolves around the Personas, I ensured that the effort invested by the client is never lost as most user research tends to be.

To put yourself in the shoes of an Orbital HR member and get a closer view at the end-result, click around the prototype in Figma!

Tiffany Brown (Advisory Lead)

“Through this project, we were able to open up new relationship with [Orbital Oil] HR and just completed an Executive Readout with their CHRO in Houston. This project is a first utilizing Glint data and led to [Client] purchasing Viva Insights licenses for their entire organization. During our project we prototyped the future state experience, and supported capability building for their Culture@Orbital team. Luis has done an amazing job on this project, showing great creativity, collaboration, and dedication throughout the process. I am very proud of our work. [Client] has also continually given positive accolades for the team as well.”

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