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This project was aimed for my client, PT Jasa Teknologi Informasi IBM (a subsidiary of IBM Indonesia). IBM-JTI Training Portal is an internal training information system of the company. The presence of this portal was expected to accommodate the employee training process, from initiating to holding one.

Overview

As training is quite essential for client to develop its human resources, this portal automates certain activities along the training process to make it more effective and efficient. Other than focusing on the business needs of the company, I also took into consideration the needs of every stakeholder involved in the system in which is known as the user.

The Problem

The current training portal of the company was claimed to be too complicated for user to use and quite ineffective. This makes the employee put the least interest in joining training. Also, client expected the data integration to be enhanced in order to improve the user experience and business activities.

The Proposed System

Looking into the problems, the newly-designed system was proposed to cut the long and complicated flows to the more simple ones. New features would also be developed to accommodate some flows that were still done offline. The old and dull interface would also be improved to increase the user experience as well as the business activities.

User

The users of this portal are divided into four roles, which are:
– Employee
– HR
– Supervisor
– Trainer

Role

This project is developed by five persons which consist of Project Manager, System Analyst, System Designer, Programmer, and Technical Writer & Tester. In this project, my main role is as a System Designer. I lead the design process by analysing the problem and solution, providing design guidelines, and ensuring the mockup designed is as expected before going into production.

Timeline

The whole project lasts for approximately four months (February to June 2020), but the design stage only lasts for three weeks.

Design Process

Discover

To get a clearer view of the problem, I conducted a user interview with HR (product owner) and an employee representative as they are the users with major roles on the system. I tried to seek the current problems and gather the requirements for the new system. The flows, roles, and pain points on the current system are divided as follows.

No.	User Journey	User Role	Pain Points
1.	Request a training	Employee	Employee could request a training topic to HR in a conventional way (face-to-face/offline) and the request records could be unwell-organized since it was out of the portal.
2.	Look for potential trainer	HR	HR approached a potential trainer in a conventional way (offline) and it was inefficient as it took some time to get face-to-face.
3.	Schedule and open a training	HR	–
4.	Apply for a training	Employee	The current system didn’t have course requirements handler so every employee could freely apply for a training that didn’t match their existing skill and knowledge.
6.	Approve or decline employee’s training applicant	Supervisor	Approve or decline was done via email and client concerned the email was overcapacity as the space was limited.
7.	Confirm class attendance of a training	Employee	Attendance was confirmed via email and client concerned the email was overcapacity as the space was limited.
8.	Attend the class	Employee	–
9.	Do the quiz	Employee	The quiz was done via Google Form and the quiz result were recorded separately and made it hard for HR/Trainer to review them.
10.	Evaluate the training/trainer	Employee	HR wasn’t able to edit the evaluation questionnaire on the current system.
11.	Get a training certification	Employee	Certificate could be downloaded via email and client concerned the email was overcapacity as the space was limited.

Define

Based on the observation result above, it is known that some activities or tasks were still be done out of the system. It makes the training process unintegrated and the data scattered. Therefore, it would complicate some tasks for the user and make it hard for stakeholders to track down certain data. Also, the needs for new features were spotted to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of user activity.

Develop

Before continuing to the design stage, the proposed solutions on the portal are shown below.

No.	User Journey	User Role	Solutions/Opportunities
1.	Request a training	Employee	A form that enables employee to request a training
2.	Look for potential trainer	HR	An input field on the training form to insert the trainer’s name. Once the training form is saved, the system would send an invitation to the potential trainer assigned. Later on, the potential trainer could approve or decline that invitation request.
3.	Schedule and open a training	HR	Inputs fields of trainer’s name and course requirements
4.	Apply for a training	Employee	An information of the course requirements.
6.	Approve or decline employee’s training applicant	Supervisor	An employee training approval feature
7.	Confirm class attendance of a training	Employee	Attendance confirmation feature
8.	Attend the class	Employee	–
9.	Do the quiz	Employee	Quiz feature along with the result.
10.	Evaluate the training/trainer	Employee	An editable questionnaire form
11.	Get a training certification	Employee	A direct certificate download on the portal

Design

To keep the design consistent and appealing, I came up with the design guideline as below. This guideline also benchmarked from the current IBM JTI career page portal. The blue color was chosen as the primary color as it is the color of IBM. The other bright and sunny colors give balance to the dark blue to make the overall appearance of the portal more stylish and easy on the eye.

Some of the designs according to the proposed solutions are shown below. The overall interface was transformed to a whole new look but below are the main changes.

Conclusion

What I learned from designing this project is that user experience could play a significant role in the business process of a company. One small thing leads to another big thing. By paying attention to the detail which in this case is the user experience of the stakeholders, you could transform the old-fashioned and conventional way in the business to an enhanced-one.