Meta

Integrated Employee
Experience

Meta's internal products have evolved organically as the organization grew, resulting in a collection of tools rather than a cohesive suite that caters to employees' needs. To address this, the design team embarked on an exercise to envision a unified suite. The goal was to foster discussions and find ways to better organize these products around employees' goals, context, and tasks.

Drawing from in-depth research on employee mental models, user journeys, and situation awareness, I developed a navigation system aimed at integrating our products and contributed to the overall direction of the concept design. To achieve a new navigation integrating our products, I created and tested various framework concepts that aligned with employees' mental models, improved discoverability, and enhanced the overall user experience by incorporating familiar workflow patterns from existing tools.

  • The project started on April 2021 and the MVP was delivered on March 2022

  • Product designer helping on the concept development and leading the navigation framework.

  • Orchestration Workshop, Brainstorm sessions, UCD, Weekly Sync, Protytyping, Card sorting, User test

Understanding the problem

We conducted a comprehensive journey mapping exercise to gain insights into the tool lifecycle at Meta. Our primary focus was on two personas: Individual Contributors (ICs) and Managers, as they represent the majority of the employee population. We examined their experiences throughout the employee life cycle, starting from the candidate journey and extending to the New Hire experience, onboarding, first performance review, and career management, specifically within the initial 0 to 6 months period.

Furthermore, we sought to gain insights into the mental models of both managers and ICs to better comprehend how they structure their time, prioritize tasks, and adapt these priorities based on the seasonal demands of the company.

We also thoroughly examine organizational systems in existing tools, identify commonalities, and uncover opportunities for integration. I engaged in effective communication with product designers at Meta and conducted an extensive audit of 17 tools, both for managers and ICs. The audit aimed to understand the navigation framework utilized for L1, L2, and L3s, as well as the placement of search and filters within these frameworks. I sought to determine the various types of objects represented in the navigation, enabling potential integrations within the suite.

A couple of insights

The fragmented experience from recruiting to the next steps within the employee lifecycle presented numerous challenges. From a product perspective, whenever a new feature was required, the development process involved creating flows within a single product, relying on users to navigate to other products to complete necessary steps and follow-ups. It became evident that we needed to prioritize use cases paired with specific personas, enabling feature development to consolidate experiences and follow a unified action across a cohesive platform.

This realization sparked the concept of introducing "moments" aligned with different stages of the employee lifecycle. Our intention behind these "moments" was to serve as triggers for delivering personalized experiences and providing crucial contextual information. By doing so, we aimed to bring clarity to company policies, minimize uncertainty, and prevent dead ends. From a navigation standpoint, our intention was for these moments to smoothly cascade into the suite's menu categories, providing steps that effectively guide users toward the most relevant information and actions.

Design Goals & Principles

How might we best orchestrate our internal products and technologies around employees’ goals, tasks, and contexts?

  • Build for product connections over siloed features

    Content is relevant, contextual, fresh, and engaging

    Intuitive discovery of offerings

    Focused and intentional experience

    Employee at center, with sense of ownership

    Product values and narratives are clear to users

    No Dead Ends/One action creates/informs others

    Proactive - Relevant experiences are surfaced

  • Cascading Navigational Hierarchy - Steps inform content

    Reduce tool expansion - Reuse or refine existent

    Actions have expected outcomes

    Seamless experience between products

    Suite has continuity with Meta's experiences

    Suite can scale for Meta growth demands

    Remote first

Prototype and iterations

Informed by this comprehensive research, I rapidly developed 3 navigation frameworks to test concepts that seamlessly integrated existing tools. The information architecture (IA) was carefully crafted based on insights gathered from mental model research. After the test, we settled on establishing four primary categories: Home, Career, People, and Life, encompassing products for career goals (NHO, onboarding, performance), engagement and connection, as well as HR processes.

The outcome

In the initial release, we partially implemented the navigation framework for integrating the 1:1 tool into the "People" tab. This enables Meta employees to take notes of their 1:1 conversations. We also used the same framework for the Career tab. However, the implementation of journey workflows is still pending as we focus on releasing the homepage with a timeline and to-do actions to assist employees in their individual journeys.

After validating one framework option, I dedicated myself to refining it up to the third level of navigation. Analyzing the current products, I identified recurring workflow patterns and commonalities in the navigation structure. This exploration led me to discover different principles of organization, such as feature-based, task-based, and resource-based approaches. To address these challenges, I devised a strategy involving the identification and categorization of various constructs, including artifacts, resources, messaging, collections, and alerts. By aligning the framework usage with specific construct types, we aimed to achieve greater consistency in regards to the IA and navigation.