Global Gathering Planner

Design a tool that helps the HR team plan Global Gathering in a more sleek and efficient way by decreasing friction points during the planning process.

Role

UX Designer

Team

3 UX Design Interns

Date

August 2023

Client

Athlon Studio

OVERVIEW

Athlon Studio hosts a yearly Global Gathering for its employees since the team is fully remote and spread across multiple countries. While most employees live in Canada and the USA, others live in New Zealand, Spain, and the UK.

Considering the studio’s growth in the last year, there is a significant amount of coordination required to plan their Global Gathering. The HR administrative team found itself in need of a more efficient and streamlined planning process.

PROBLEM

The HR team relies predominantly on spreadsheets to meticulously manage budgets, expenditures, travel plans, and passport and visa requisites.

We identified that collecting information and itinerary planning were aspects of the process that required a lot of back and forth between the HR team, stakeholders and the employees, in this case the travelers.

GOAL

Design a tool that supports the Global Gathering planning process in a more efficient way, with a focus on decreasing friction points for both organizers and travelers.

KEY SOLUTIONS

The administrative team would have access to all employee’s personal and traveling details. We designed two different views: a compressed table view of all the details at quick glance, and a more in-depth list view that even let’s users assign documents.

Traveler management

Organizers would also be able to create, manage and publish customizable forms for travelers to answer. Form answers can be directly linked to travelers profiles. The aim is to give HR team a centralized place where they can efficiently request and retrieve information from travelers.

Form builder

RESEARCH

Our research process consisted of both user interviews and a comparator/competitor analysis.

6 user interviews

HR team, Athlon employees (in this case travelers)

1 comparator competitor analysis

We looked at the interview responses from the HR team, separating them into sticky notes in order to find patterns. We clustered them into the following specific phases of the planning process:

Discussions and planning
Collecting information
Booking
Tools

Our users on the HR side relied on Google Spreadsheets and Forms to track information, Slack channels to send announcements. and external sources for booking flights and stays.

We defined a list of priorities that we wanted to include in our solution, and conducted a comparator analysis with these in mind:

Document gathering: Our defining criteria was how efficiently document managing (uploading, viewing, sharing), use of input forms, and ease of finding information was.
Event planning: We looked at planning sites for features such as budgeting, connecting travelers to booking agents, sharing trip information, and transferring booking details quickly.
User preferences: We looked at features like allowing travelers to choose and display preferences.

INSIGHTS

HR Team spent hours managing loads of information from 25+ team members (sending Slack messages, creating forms, creating multiple spreadsheets, plugging in answers from forms).

There’s a lot of pull from the HR side to get all the necessary information and details from travelers. They need travelers to be more self-sufficient and to provide information in time and correctly.

What features or solutions did we want to include in our concepts?

Looking at our findings from the interviews and the comparator analysis, we brainstormed 3 different UX concepts:

IDEATION

The Global Optimizer: aims to provide a centralized location for all gathering related information (files, user profiles, form responses). “Findability” is the core theme across its features, allowing the HR team to quickly pull up information whenever they need it.

Concept 1

The Elite Planner: Provide HR with a guided process to plan the yearly Global Gathering, all in a platform dedicated to event planning. Some features would include: step by step checklist, budgeting, quick glance of all planning aspects.

Concept 2

The MVP: with a simple and straightforward approach, this concept allows HR team to request and access traveler info while simultaneously updating travelers. This concept aims to streamline the admin side of planning the Global Gathering while keeping the employees informed.

Concept 3 (selected)