Oracle
Summary
Team: Tiffany Vo, Frances Yang, Zoya Razzak, Christy Yun, Vivian Hong (Mentor)
Role: Iteration + Prototyping Lead
Deliverables: User Research Report + High-Fidelity Prototypes
My Berkeley Innovation team partnered with Oracle Design Researchers to understand how and why people set goals in order to improve the goal setting experience in the workplace, with a special emphasis on Millennials and Gen Z. We conducted research on motivations, pain points, and practices in the goal-setting process, consolidated them into key insights, and made personas to guide our ideation. After converging on the most important needs for Gen Z workers, we designed an enterprise product that aims to make the goal setting and achieving process as easy as possible for Gen Z employees.
Due to the NDA our team signed, I won’t be able to explain the final solutions or designs I produced, so I’ll instead walk you a bit through the process we took and what I learned.
Research
To inform our design process, we conducted research on people’s goal setting practices, both in the workplace and in their personal habits.
Surveys
We sent out a survey over Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to learn about the frequency with which people set and revisit goals, how comfortable they are sharing their goals, and information where quantitative data would be the most helpful measure. From the 97 responses we gathered, we learned:
Gen Z employees set and revisit their goals on a much more frequent cadence than other generations. They often break down long-term goals into smaller, more manageable goals and tasks.
Gen Z enjoy using tools that are customizable and visually appealing to set and track their goals, such as Notion or physical methods like bullet journaling.
Interviews
With a better idea of Gen Z’s habits with regards to goal setting, we started conducting interviews with 17 of our survey respondents to learn more about the why behind those habits. Two of our biggest insights from this were:
Many members of this generation believe that support from their workplace is a crucial part of completing their goals. Workplaces should be providing resources, support, and opportunities for employees to achieve goals.
Social pressure and transparency influences people’s motivations and accountability, both in positive ways (i.e. "accountability buddies") and negative ways (i.e. embarrassment of not accomplishing publicized goals).
Converging: Synthesis
With the bulk of our research done, we began to narrow down exactly what we wanted to focus on with the rest of the project. We made an affinity map to compile all of our observations from research and categorize them to reveal clusters and high-level themes about Gen Z’s goal setting habits.
Afterwards, we talked at length about what we thought what the most salient issues facing Gen Z were, and we ended up developing this How Might We question to guide our process moving forward:
HMW: How might we help employees build a greater sense of ownership, support, and accountability toward achieving their goals?
Process
This is where the NDA restrictions start to take effect a little more, so I’ll try to walk through more of the process without naming particular features we thought of and designed.
Personas
To guide our design process moving forward, we made personas to encapsulate the two main groups of Gen Z we identified in our research. We focused on their pain points, motivations, and needs in the goal setting process. Later on, we made the choice to focus our designs on only one of the personas that we felt encompassed more of people in Gen Z.
Ideation
After narrowing down the exact scope of our project, we did a few rounds of ideation to come up with different solutions to our HMW question. We then converged again and voted on the ideas we thought would best help users by placing stars on each individual idea, with an example on the left.
User Flows
After deciding on our final ideas, we made user flows to figure out how exactly they would interrelate, what screens we needed to design, and what we needed to prioritize. To give a high-level overview, we envisioned a dashboard for goal tracking that’s catered to Gen Z’s needs and a few other features that catered to their desire for support and community in achieving their goals.
Prototyping & Iteration
With a better understanding of the requirements for each page, we began prototyping. Starting off with sketches, we continued to iterate based off of client and stakeholder feedback until we reached a high fidelity prototype.
Reflections
This project taught me a lot, not only about my generation’s goal setting habits and best practices, but also in terms of design skills. With regards to project timing, I wish that we had focused a little bit less on getting user research to be perfectly right, as we had to forego user testing toward the end of the project. This project also gave me a lot of opportunities to put together presentation decks and orally convey my design work and rationales, and I always appreciate the opportunity to improve my design communication skills.
This was my last project with Berkeley Innovation, so it was a bittersweet experience. I really enjoyed the opportunity to work with a consultant team one last time and with the clients at Oracle Design. I’m indebted to Lila, Lynn, and Ivy over at Oracle for all the time and energy they put into giving us feedback and mentoring us along the way.
thanks for reading! 🌻
the team post-final deliverable presentation :)