THE LAB KIT

A Digital Tool for Workshop Planning

OVERVIEW: The Lab Kit is a digital tool created by the Greenhouse, Deloitte’s Innovation Lab.

We were tasked with redesigning The Lab Kit — which launched six years prior — to drive forward the Greenhouse’s brand as an innovation leader and empower more than 33,000 practitioners at Deloitte to design and plan for interactive and impactful meetings, co-creation workshops, and events.

Over the course of a year, as a part of the Greenhouse’s Digital Experience team, I led the product’s redesign to improve its user experience.

Conducting user research, communicating learnings to stakeholders, developing insights into designs, mocking up wireframes, prioritizing sprint tasks, writing user stories for developers, and testing.

SKILLS:

ROLE:

I was the in-house product designer/UX researcher. I worked closely with the product owner, business leaders, and a partner agency with developers and UI/UX designers.

PROCESS

Stage 1:

RESEARCH

IDEATE

Stage 2:

Stage 3:

PROTOTYPE

Stage 4:

PRIORITIZE

DEVELOP AND TEST

Stage 5:

Of the hundreds of small and large design decisions made throughout the project, I’ve highlighted three below:

1. MIMICKING THE VALUE OF A CONVERSATION

Insight: The Lab Kit hosts 50+ “methods” (group activities for brainstorming, strategizing etc.) that are well-loved by power users. However, when they recommended the tool to others in their network, new users often asked for advice rather than navigating to relevant methods themselves. While they valued the content in The Lab Kit, they were intimidated by the large library of methodologies.

“The teams I support have to do a little work to get to the content, but they won't do that. Instead, they just 'call someone' and ask to talk it out."

interview quote from a power user

Coming out of the research, I wondered: how might we recreate a personable, conversational approach within the tool to help users uncover what they need to accomplish in a workshop or meeting?

Design solution: We developed a feature called the Design Wizard which asks the user a series of questions about their desired outcomes, reducing decision fatigue and fostering the confidence that comes from being assisted. From there, they can select specific activities to accomplish each desired outcome and auto-populate them into a meeting agenda that they can then customize.

Impact: 36% of users began using the Design Wizard within 3 months of the feature’s release, reflective of the “beginner” user base.

2. CUTTING OUT JARGON

Insight: Once a user is more familiar with The Lab Kit, they’re not as likely to want the hand-holding of the Design Wizard. At that point, they’re more comfortable exploring a library. However, the amount of content was still overwhelming.

From analytics, we noticed our filters were heavily underutilized and in interviews, they were ignored even if we directly pointed users to them. We realized that our filter categories made perfect sense to the content creators (expert facilitators) but meant nothing to regular users.

Design solution: We reframed our filters to be in the language of the user — using “desired outcomes” as categories instead of the “action” of the activities.

Filter comparison

3. BUILDING USER TRUST AND CONFIDENCE

Insight: The Greenhouse Innovation Lab team behind The Lab Kit’s methodologies is comprised of creatives. However, a large segment of Deloitte is cautious and working in risk-adverse fields like Audit and Tax. It was hard to convert them into users of a tool that’s intended to break people out of their business-as-usual thinking.

Conservative users needed confidence in the methodologies in order to use them.

Design solution: We took several measures to increase user confidence in our content. For each piece of content, we made visible the number of times it had been used, added a “See it in Action” tab to showcase relevant example use cases and testimonials, and built out in-site feedback mechanisms to gather more.

IMPACT

Erica, a huge thank-you for your creativity and hard work on the design phase of The Lab Kit and The Relationship Kit. Your ability to find creative solutions to our user needs, create beautiful designs, and navigate stakeholders across the Greenhouse and the firm have resulted in a tool that is meaningfully changing the way people build relationships and do their jobs in a better, more engaging way. We're so excited to see these tools come to life. Thank you!

“

”

– Greenhouse business leaders

After redesigning the tool,

  • Distinct users grew by 70%

  • Unique sessions grew by 161%

These numbers were calculated by comparing October 2021 data with October 2022 data. The redesign was released in August of 2022.