A Case Study

myOrg

Client: GapTech

Company leaders aim to create optimized organizational structures underneath them to execute against their goals. In order to make data-driven organizational decisions, our Vice Presidents and Senior Directors needed a simple way to see and understand their organizational structures to judge if and where changes were needed. My team and I created an organizational analytics tool that provided an easy-to-understand view of insightful information about a leaders organization, which proves actionable as they in turn use the information to make structural org changes to optimize the business. Previously leaders and analysts would spend hours piecing together data from disparate sources and look at them in a spreadsheet or slide. Our tool freed those leaders and analysts resulting in significant time and cost savings. Furthermore, the tool accumulated many more users who could now understand and leverage the information versus not using any data due to the complexity of the previous form factor the data lived in.

28

hours saved monthly

$4,300

in monthly cost savings

Overview

Optimized organizational structures put companies in the best position to execute their goals. Naturally, company leaders desire to create and maintain the best organizational structures underneath them. It is challenging, however, for Gap’s Vice Presidents (VPs) and Senior Directors to keep track of all the members of their various teams and how they’ve resourced each of them relative to one another. Leaders must also be aware of the composition of their organizations (orgs) in order to know if structural changes should be made at any given time. Due to the disparate nature of Gap’s data, gathering all the requisite information and combining it to even see any insights were time-consuming and cumbersome tasks. In order to make data-driven organizational decisions, the company needed a simple way to understand their organizational structure and see key insights. My team and I saw an opportunity to create a product that could accomplish these goals.
While the data engineers on my team managed the pipelines to centralize data, I focused on the design problem at hand. I needed to not only show my users (i.e., leaders of large organizations) their orgs comprehensively in a digestible manner, but also provide actionable insights by flagging changes and irregularities in their structures. Furthermore, I needed to clearly outline a path within the product that they could take to double-click and explore flagged issues. We quickly developed an MVP to test with our stakeholders and followed up with many iterations based on the insights I gained with each new version.

Test & Iterate

Insight #1 Users were visually overwhelmed by the quantity of information

Problem: The first version of our product met the user need of providing information; however, it was visually overwhelming. One of the use cases that VPs wanted to use our tool for was to know what parts of their teams needed restructuring during company-wide reorganizations. This required a view that provided (a) the total number of teams in their organization; (b) the names of those teams; (c) the employment breakdown of each team. There is clearly value in all of this information; however it required a great deal of our product’s page real estate for a very specific use case. While VPs liked the information, the specificity of the use case’s data obfuscated other important data that the tool provided due to the quantity of the information.
Design solution: Feedback on the MVP from my test users indicated that our product’s user interface was overwhelming. The product was already split into two main sections: (1) A straightforward overview of who were on the teams, what they did, and where they sat in the organization; (2) A section containing details that enabled additional analysis to be done apart from the pre-visualized information in the first section.
In order to balance simplicity with effectiveness in the first section, I limited filtering capabilities to only two core segments (Organizational Hierarchy and the Product Line). Furthermore, I made the investigative spaces collapsible and expandable to further provide visual relief. In this way, the spaces only took up visual real estate when they were actively being used to investigate issues.
Similarly, to make the data in the “additional detail” section digestible, I collected input from users to understand which fields provided actionable information and limited the views to only those elements. As the detail in this section still imposed extra visual weight in the tool, I eliminated other components of the tool except for the “detail table” after users stated the table’s information was actionable. It was both a prioritization and design exercise with my users.

Insight #2 The tool’s interactive capabilities were not intuitive; unless I verbally told users that something was clickable they rarely discovered it on their own.

Demonstrating design enhancements to communicate click-ability

Problem: The main advantage of having a detailed table in a tool that shows summarized metrics is the affordance that clicking on some of the summarized metrics gives you by filtering the table down to the relevant resources. After trialing V2 of the tool with users, I found that most users weren’t using a key part of the product: the detailed tables that expanded once one clicked data showcased on the front page dashboard. Upon further investigation, it became clear that users didn’t know the data was clickable. Their behavior was a result of most metrics being delivered in a static format to our users historically.
Design solution: To lead users to a new behavior, I made the clickable portions of the tool react when one’s mouse hovered over key data to indicate interactivity. I also included visual indicators for buttons for some of the interaction. The changes resulted in usage of the feature, revealing that my design proved effective.

Insight #3: When users don’t trust the underlying data, they won’t use the product.

Problem: Even after implementing my changes to V2, usage of the tool’s V3 still lagged. As I tested V3 with users, I realized that usage was not unanimous because our product gave regularly refreshed data that may conflict with old data that a user may have locked onto after hearing it anecdotally elsewhere. For example, leaders will have come out of a meeting in which a business partner told them an old version of a metric that then conflicted with what they saw in the tool. This discredited the tool for users resulting in them not using it.
Design solution: A simple UI adjustment to populate the time and date of the most recent data refresh oriented users’ expectations around what data they were seeing and when to expect data refreshes. After making this update, we found increased usage (and happiness) with our test group, giving us confidence to push the product out for general use, where it continues to be widely used.

Results

The continually increasing usage of our product has proven its value, and I regularly meet with users to find ways to enhance the tool to enable its effectiveness. Our product gives leaders an easy to understand view of insightful information about their organization, which they in turn use to make structural org change to optimize their businesses. Amongst other benefits, the time Gap leadership spends filling in data to prepare for key meetings such as Quarterly Business Reviews has decreased significantly as a direct result of our product. Thus enabling leaders to think about higher level business problems rather than spending time rounding up data and trying to make sense of it.