Synopsis
During my 2024 summer internship with Textron Inc. in Providence, RI as an Information Technology Leadership Development Program Intern, I redesigned the mobile application of Textron’s employee portal/resource center from a basic and uninteresting interface to a new and intuitive experience.
Role: UI/UX Designer, Researcher, Interaction Designer
Timeline: 4 weeks (6 weeks dedicated to conducting Figma risk analysis)
Tools: Figma, Fig Jam, Figma Slides
Challenge
Textron is a manufacturing and engineering-focused enterprise that isn’t focused on UX/UI practices. The main challenge during this 3-month process was communicating the purpose of my work from the start. The corporate IT custom development team was looking to create a mobile solution for the internal portal, and I sought to collect feedback during report outs from employees and leadership.
How can Textron develop the best solution for its internal portal and what are employees looking for in a mobile application?
Objective
- Justify the decision-making behind improving the current state of the app’s UI
- Design and prototype the new interface for visual communication
- Create documentation for later understanding and reference
Initial Research
The current application, as I’ve learned from Textron employees in various business functions (human resources, finance, legal), is difficult to navigate. Users are unmotivated to interact with the mobile portal in its current state. The project was in development before I arrived at the company, but served no purpose as a currently unlisted Apple application.
I was tasked to justify my design decisions throughout this project process and to create a pitch presentation at the end of my 10 weeks with Textron.
Design Principles
I utilized three design principles for my project: Gestalt principles, visual communication principles, and interaction design principles.
The Gestalt principles of visual perception detail how our brains create structures and patterns by default. Using these principles helps define design elements that are the most effective in certain situations. They allow designers to direct the user's attention to focus on certain points on a screen. The principles include good figure, proximity, similarity, continuation, closure, and symmetry.
Visual communication principles are when tangible things around us make sense visually when pairing fundamental elements of design and principles of visual communication. The principles are color, contrast, hierarchy, repetition, typography, space, white space, balance, emphasis, and movement.
https://blog.adplist.org/post/10-principles-of-visual-designs
Interaction design principles are derived from the book The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. There are six principles of designing interactions that affect digital products and their relevancy. By applying universal design principles to technology, we can further human-centered design practices on our applications. Visibility, feedback, constraints, mapping, consistency, and affordance all impact user interfaces.
https://medium.com/cryptocurrency-hub/ui-ux-design-in-2024-trends-principles-and-best-practices-14a291505cab
UX App Map
An app map is an application version of a site map, which is a tool to understand an interface’s navigation. The internal portal currently features a crowded layout that employees struggled to use.
Original Portal Home Screen
Original Portal with Settings
I created a diagram to visualize the navigation and figure out my next steps to simplify the process of walking through the app.
Original Application Navigation
As evident on the site map, there are many locations to navigate to from the home page, which creates a convoluted experience for users. Using the internal portal’s website for inspiration, I transformed the navigation into one that’s easier to understand. There are six primary locations that employees will be able to access, in addition to a settings page.
New Application Navigation
Prototyping
After a 6-week security risk analysis process, I began prototyping my portal redesign in Figma. I received feedback from my coworkers throughout this process to understand what elements for the app would be useful for daily tasks. I focused on navigation redundancy and looked to create multiple interactions to achieve the same goal, as users typically do not follow the same process for every action they take.
The prototype displayed in this case study is for external use. Certain modifications and liberties were taken to protect the intellectual property of Textron.
Feedback
During my internship, I sought out many opportunities to receive constructive feedback from my colleagues in IT and other departments. The last week of my internship consisted of report outs, allowing interns to showcase their projects to the company, including executive leadership.
I detailed my work on the employee resource portal, using an iPhone to flip between the current unlisted application and my Figma prototype to communicate the importance of a refresh. Each employee I spoke to had suggestions and comments on features that would directly impact their work.
Original Benefits Screen
New Pay & Benefits Screen
For a company built on legacy systems, it was an exciting experience to be able to introduce UX/UI principles to my team at Textron. With the response from stakeholders who were genuinely interested in the interface I designed, I highly enjoyed collaborating with my coworkers and the work I completed throughout the summer.