Ethos Group is a company that focuses on creating valuable customer experiences in the automobile industry by providing consulting, technology, compliance, product administration, training, and recruiting services to automotive dealerships. This summer, I interned in the IT department as a UX designer. Although I spent most of my summer working remotely, I was blessed to have the opportunity to visit my team in person in Dallas during week 8 of my internship!

I worked in a cross-functional Agile development team and was specifically assigned to improving experiences for recruiting and compliance-related products. My biggest project assigned to me this summer was the Ethos Employee Directory — a feature deriving from our intranet portal for internal employees to stay connected and find contacts online easily.

Problem Statement

The outdated ServiceNow platform used internally amongst employees has no centralized location to find out information about other employees. Amongst Ethos Group Employees all throughout the company, a common user need was to find out information about other employees in the company. For example, people felt they wanted to search for contact information about people working on a certain team or employees often wanted an easy way to find out their coworker’s timezone. With this we were able to come up with the problem statement: Help employees search and find specific co-workers so they can get the information they need immediately.

Challenges

Re-iterating!

Before my first internship experience, I had not dove deep into how many design iterations can be done when it came to building the “perfect” version of a feature. Quotations on perfect, of course, because the design can always be improved. With this project, I spent the vast majority of time making imperfect wireframes and solutions to help me come to create the best-suited design for the application. This was important to me as I got to realize information can be presented many different ways and there can always be a way to make something, even more, user-friendly.

User Research & Interviews

Since this is going to be an application used by all Ethos Group employees, I was firstly intimidated by a large amount of stakeholders present in this project. With this project, I was able to spend a substantial amount interviewing and surveying people from all different parts of the company to understand their personal intentions for the Employee Directory. Although appealing to a large set of users was intimidating at first, by taking the proper time to review, research, and understand how current employees were finding out information about each other, I was motivated to design a well-suited application that made finding contacts easier.

Takeaways

This was my first industry experience and I was able to learn so much! I understood the importance of Agile & Scrum and how these principles facilitate the workflow at Ethos Group. Moreover, I was able to properly commit to a project with a cross-functional team and had been present in this project case from the beginning of this project to the first testing phase. Throughout working on the Employee Directory, I was able to understand how important research was to appealing to a large group of users. By taking extra time to research and participate in design sprints, I felt prepared with ideas while working on this project. Overall, I felt that the duration of this project gave me a fair understanding of the design process from an industry perspective.

This project is protected under an NDA! For more details please contact me ghosal.monica@gmail.com