Personal Insight

Our team has integrated keyword mind mapping into limitless design explorations, collaborating with fellow designers to capture a range of perspectives. We firmly believed that creativity flourishes through open collaboration, allowing us to dive directly into innovative concepts and maximize our collective potential while keeping our fundimental questions in mind.

• What enhances productivity for users in today’s hybrid workplaces?

• How do hybrid work environments impact users' productivity and work-life balance?

• What do users seek to understand about their productivity and connection with colleagues?

• How do users feel about their daily workloads?

• What strategies do users employ to maintain collaboration in a virtual setting?

After examining various strategies to enhance users’ work-life balance and efficiency, the team recognized the need to validate the features and concepts related to personal insights. We aimed to research how users optimally experience these insights and how our features would directly impact their daily workflows.

Discovering improvements

To bridge the gap between our designers' theories and vocabulary and the actual user experience, I took a lead to opt for a hybrid research approach.The research comprises two main components.

• The first component adopts an attitudinal approach to explore individuals' experiences, focusing on their perspectives regarding team communication and collaboration through technology.

• The second component examines users' behavioral and attitudinal feedback by having participants interact with five prototypes. This allows the team to gather usability insights, which are further enriched through post-usability interviews

After conducting comprehensive research that analyzed both qualitative and quantitative data, our team successfully delivered a research synthesis to the broader team, highlighting our findings and recommendations.

Guided by users: using key findings as our compass

Users expressed varying interpretations and definitions of the feature names, with some feeling that the features did not align with their titles at first glance. Additionally, concerns about privacy and data exposure were vague; users worried about how this data might influence their evaluation from a managerial perspective. They envisioned a tool that could connect them with colleagues in a data-visualized format, but without creating additional social pressure in the workplace.

Based on our research findings, we organized our ideas according to emotional valence, readability, usability, and perceived usefulness, allowing us to streamline our potential solutions.

Key findings in action: Clear and intuitive solutions for users and business

Based on our findings and users’ verbal and non-verbal cues, I developed recommendations for the feature that align with both user needs and stakeholder vision.

This research identified opportunities for more intuitive feature titles, clearer alignment of feature concepts with each tab, privacy-conscious features, and customizable settings that users can tailor to their work styles.

01. Indecent exposure

Many users express concerns about the lack of guidance and clarity regarding intent. They argue that just because something can be displayed doesn’t mean it should be. Information intended to promote one type of behavior can easily lead to unintended consequences.​

"For certain types of people, having too much information could counteract what you’re trying to do, which is to get people to collaborate. It could backfire.”

We updated our design to focus on “manager insights” versus “team insights,” allowing individual contributors to use these insights as tools for engaging with others, not just managers. Additionally, we provide clear definitions of exposure levels and data usage, ensuring that analytics are tailored specifically for the user.

02. Hybrid season, or is it over?

Hybrid work is now a reality for many, highlighting the need for a formal tool to organize hybrid schedules. However, user feedback shows that lifted workplace policies raise concerns about social pressure and anxiety regarding colleagues' locations, potentially pushing employees in specific directions.

" We're a hybrid in a couple different ways. Also, there's a discussion about when to bring everyone to office.”

Considering Webex’s diverse user demographics, a feature showing employees' physical locations may not be effective. There’s no clear link between location and collaboration. Instead, our team opted to promote direct collaboration over surface-level interactions like office attendance.

03. The grey areas of judgment

Users’ responses made us consider: What judgments are we asking our users to make about one another? We need to keep this question in mind as we design insights that reveal individual behaviors and traits, as these could lead to biases toward colleagues.

" I don’t want to be biased. If I assume someone is introverted, I might not bother them as much.”

Our team shifted from personality categorization to a connection-focused solution that allows users to reach out to colleagues and track the organic growth of their network.

04. Wellbeing vs Productivity

There is a distinct tension between viewing well-being as a means to enhance productivity and recognizing it as a crucial factor for the mental, physical, emotional, and relational health of the team.

" What else could help understand well-being? “What about break timing? and aligning break timings to improve health and improve productivity for the company."

 The solution shifted from monitoring everyone's data to focusing on individual productivity. A generalized data chart wasn't successfully conveying the intended message, so our team concentrated on identifying interruptions that may affect users' work-life balance.

05. Categorizing insights with clear vocabulary

Many users reacted positively when they could easily read the data and its explanations. However, when the insight content was categorized under specific terms like “well-being” and “cohesion,” users often felt uncertain about which teams the data referred to and developed varying definitions and expectations.

To address this, our team reorganized the features with clear, intuitive, and simple categorizations by revisiting the initial mind map.

Final Touches

By clarifying direction and aligning with users’ mental models, our team successfully delivered Webex Personal Insights, a unified dashboard for enterprise users and admins that boosts productivity and enables better collaboration in a hybrid work environment.

Keeping It Sustainable and accessible for All

As a product designer, our responsibilities extend beyond the product launch. It is crucial to monitor user feedback and address any issues while collaborating with engineers and design system owners to ensure the product remains accessible and sustainable across various use cases.

• I continuously collaborate with the broader team to create a consistent experience throughout the Cisco app to align our feature UI specifications with their guidance, creating any additional components as needed and organizing our UI specifications to accommodate all operating systems and devices.

• I worked closely with engineers and accessibility evaluators, to enhance our features in line with WCAG requirements, providing a synchronized experience for users with disabilities and those using right-to-left languages.

  
  

Just the beginning

Personal Insights has been an ongoing project supporting our global user base since 2021. Our dedicated team collaborates closely with various multidisciplinary groups to ensure the product remains robust and user-friendly. We’ve seen a steady increase in user traffic and engagement, underscoring its growing significance in daily workflows. This continued commitment reflects our focus on meeting the evolving needs of our users.

• Monthly Participation: Supports  650k participants each month

• Personal Insights feature is now utilized by 36,000 enterprises

• User Engagement: Notable increase in user traffic and engagement over time (exact statistics are confidential)

• Accessibility Improvements: In 2024, collaborated with the engineering team to successfully resolve 140 accessibility tickets, ensuring compliance with WCAG 2.2 AAA standards

• Global support: supporting 30% of non-english global user base, including 'right to left' languages

• Enhanced support for voiceover and keyboard commands, promoting an inclusive user experience