LAB
Learning at BCG
Company | Boston Consulting Group
Role | Senior Product Designer
I led the design initiatives for LAB, BCG's internal learning team during their platform transition, supporting the upskilling needs of over 20,000 global employees. I established the design system, guided the product roadmap through user research and feedback modeling, and collaborated with stakeholders to develop distinctive learning experiences.
Guiding stakeholders
Leading a small team, I worked on platform enhancements and helped specialty business stakeholders bring their learners to the new platform.
Kickoff Communication
One challenge was onboarding stakeholders to an unfamiliar platform and process. We collaborated on timelines, requirements, and personas during kickoffs to define clear expectations.
Explaining the Platform With a Template Flow
Creating a high-level user flow helped stakeholders understand all the page types on the platform and how they worked together.
Research and Discovery
Utilizing BCG's internal employee input panel and analytics team, we continually tested ideas with real users for a data-driven design approach. I created discussion guides and conducted 4 major user interview projects with 50+ participants to facilitate research.
Overlaying Data
The first step in analyzing the new learning platform was to map the experience end-to-end. This allowed the team to identify easy wins and envision a happy path. From this master user flow, my team and I broke out discrete flows and layered qualitative data to show context and help stakeholders prioritize improvements.
Feedback, Research, and Initatives in Harmony
To help our Agile process, I developed a model for converting user feedback into initiatives and research goals. This process sorts feedback and then applies existing "Critical to Quality" and "Kano" models.
Card Sorting During the Pandemic
Analytics identified that learners struggled to navigate our catalog. We used a note app (Workflowy) to run virtual card sorting during the pandemic. This allowed a streamlined interface where we could duplicate and save each configuration. We discovered that our catalog was based on a non-intuitive business structure.
User Interviews
We followed card sorting by building a prototype and running moderated user interviews. I developed a discussion guide for the virtual interviews that ran on a separate laptop to keep my conversation with the participants seamless. Participants responded to titles that matched areas for improvement in their quarterly reviews.
I really just come to LAB after reviews to brush up on any gaps
Jumping Into Design
After discovery, we quickly jumped into the "pencils before pixels" approach and white-boarded ideas.
Visual Design That’s Not From Scratch
We utilized a pattern library based on Atomic Design principles to keep our work across stakeholders and platforms consistent. A huge plus with utilizing modular design components is that nailing down their logic saves valuable time in development since all the teams are using the same vernacular.
Rapid Prototypes = Rapid Results
Using Figma, our design and prototype tools are one and the same - which allowed us to move quickly into testing. Stakeholders loved seeing user feedback, qualitative data, problems, and solutions overlayed onto prototypes.
Modular Design
For the new LAB navigation, I designed interchangable column components to be used within dropdowns, allowing each menu to evolve and change over the long term.
Digging Into Development
In addition to my product design work, I took over some light development work. The LMS platform had unique restrictions, limiting us to pure HTML & CSS and not allowing media queries to target specific breakpoints. With these limitations, this project became a masterclass in using Flexbox to create modules that worked across all breakpoints.
