Background
The goal of this project is to design a digital space tailored for FordLabs employees, addressing the need for a more efficient and cost-effective solution for recognizing birthdays, accomplishments, milestones, and other events. This tool would allow teams of various sizes to recognize each other’s life events and accomplishments. The primary motivator for this project is due to existing solutions having high costs despite failing to meet individual teams' varying use cases.
Project Sponsor
Ford Labs

Project Timeline
Spring 2024

Team
Myself
Prithvi Manjunatha
Claire O’Malley
Damaris Adeniji
Tejasvi Bhagwatkar
Erika Suin Shin
Isaac Cheung
Joel Archer
Kavni Shah
Mahi Tripathi
Personal Contributions
•Website Layout
•Site Flow
•Popup Prompts

Tools Used
•Miro
•Figma

Skills
•Competitive Analysis
•User Interviews
•Site Mapping
•Hi-Fideltiy Mockups
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Problem Space
How can we create a simple, user-friendly platform for FordLabs’ employees to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and baby showers and recognize accomplishments and milestones.
 
Goals
•Understand which features are most useful and effective for Ford employees to use in their current digital space
•Utilize our research to develop wireframes and design concepts to ideate the platform's composition
•Create high-fidelity interactive prototypes and conduct usability tests with FordLabs employees.
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Our Research

Competitive Analysis
The goal of our competitive analysis is to explore ten employee celebration platforms similar to Kudoboard. We broke down each platform by features, price, and board types, and compared them to Kudoboard. This helped us identify features to include in our model, understand Kudoboard's significance, and help with our decision-making process.

Takeaways
•Adding a calendar feature to track birthdays, anniversaries, and work events would improve organization within our platform
•Possible point system,  initiated by managers rather than being transactional, could also enhance our platform
•Allowing gift card donations within birthday posts for users to show appreciation for one another 
Interviews
The goal of our interview was to interview 5 FordLabs employees to understand their current interactions, identify needs for virtual celebrations, explore existing systems like Kudoboard, Slack, and Webex, and uncover any pain points in their celebration processes.
Site Mapping
The goal of our site flow is to understand how we want FordLabs employees to navigate features seamlessly in the website to create a board for celebrating and recognizing their co-workers. Our team developed a site flow to visualize how the site might look and function, drawing from our previous sketches and findings.
Final Site Flow
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Hi-Fidelity Prototypes
Drawing from insights gathered during the user testing of our mid-fidelity prototypes, we refined our design and developed these interactive prototypes. Subsequently, we engaged with participants from previous user tests to conduct a final round of usability testing, collecting valuable feedback to inform the next steps in our design process.
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