Amazon Connections
While working at Amazon I had the opportunity to work as part of the Human Resources User Experience team working on the product vertical connections. The focus of this vertical is to collect data and improve the employee experience.
“Amazon Connections is an innovative program that gives Amazonians a confidential and effective way to give feedback on the workplace and help shape the future of the company. By asking employees quick questions every day, Connections leverages real time information to learn more about their experiences and introduce positive changes with internal business partners around the world. Our goal is to help develop leaders who earn trust, remove barriers to excellence and make Amazon an inspiring place to work.”
Imagery is limited to respect the privacy of the project and client.
ClientAmazonMy RoleUX Designer IIISoftwareSketch, Invision AppTeamAmazon HR UXYear2017Length6 months
Discovery and research
The connections program is 3 part process of question creation, question delivery and data analysis. As the sole designer tasked with redesigning the tools used for this initiative a few weeks of discovery and research were necessary. I met with the Senior Product Manager first and to understand the general goals of the tools/products. After our conversation she provided me with the Product Requirements Document which detailed all the functionality and feature set that she believed would be of value to the users and the connection program overall. Next I conducted Stakeholder interviews with the rest of the product team to understand their perspective on the project and how other technologies and other products intersected with the main content repository. As the last part of the discovery I met with the primary users, in this case Doctorate level research scientists. They are the individuals that write questions to gather data on many different topics throughout the Amazon employee ecosystem.
Wireframing
Stakeholder reviews
One of the challenges that made this project fun and interesting was collaborating with team members located in a different timezone. The majority of the product stakeholders and development partners that I worked were based in the Toronto office. Regularly I would present the flows and functionality to Product and Technology stakeholders to ensure that the business goals were met and functionally possible to build.
Visual Design
Usability testing
I worked with Jonathon Bergeron our Sr. Researcher to thoroughly test the functionality and make sure everything was straight forward easy to use for every major task and any scenarios that we suspected complexity might cause confusion.
Stencil
Stencil started as UI kit created by my Design Manager for the HR UX team and the employee facing projects that we worked on. A few months later when my Design Manager moved to another team one of the last things that he ask me was to make sure that Stencil was kept up to date and to work on moving it forward as a Design System for the HR tools, something he had advocated for a long time. Along with working on the connections program, I was tasked with adding to and updating components within Stencil and to work with development to ensure that the component were built to spec for projects in the future.
Press
The connections program was and still is today a high profile program for Amazon with the hope of uncovering and addressing the friction of working at Amazon. Even tho more of a private internal program It was also of interest to the press, below are a few articles to about the program.