Idea Portal

Creating a culture that empowers people to bring forward new ideas.

Problem

Idea Portal was born from a casual conversation between a designer, software engineer, product strategist, and HR who noticed that pitching product ideas at KBTG simply takes too long.

An employee would have to submit the idea through a process with multiple steps, wait 2-3 months, and hopefully someone may or may not hear about your idea?

Based on HR feedback, we also found out that employees do have ideas but struggle to share because of these concerns:

Our vision

We didn't just want to create a more efficient process, but we wanted to empower employees and design a safe space where everyone can come forward to contribute ideas.

Why is this project important❗️

The project truly felt cross-functional. Unlike my other projects, Idea Portal involved close collaboration between product and development teams which led to faster review-and-response cycles since we were constantly talking to each other.

My first taste of an agile workflow. The cross collaboration also led to more iterative cycles, quicker decision making, and flexibility in making efficient adjustments throughout the product journey.

Agile worked here because it was an internal project. Of course, there are projects that would work better with thorough and deeper preparation.

Initial explorations to design principles

We started the project a quick focus group of employees from various teams to understand the type of support employees need for their ideas. We asked questions like: What kind of resources do you need? Who do you want to support you? What is your ideal process to pitch ideas?

We collected keywords from employees and these eventually became our design principles:

Simple and fast. It should only take a few clicks to voice out an idea and have it up and ready right away.

Community to recognize and support. It's a scary thing to be creative and pitch a new idea -- but support from peers can help build confidence.

Coaching for growth. Employees cannot bring an idea to life alone. They need support from leaders and experts from other fields.

Ideation

We quickly did some desk research on existing platforms to get some inspiration. The first one that inspired us were crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe or Kickstarter. We loved how simple it was to submit an idea in just a few steps and have it displayed in a gallery format.

Both GoFundMe and Kickstarter have a user-friendly "idea form" which takes less than 5 minutes to upload an idea.

Quick-and-dirty testing

To test if an idea form is the most efficient method, we immediately mocked a one-page form and introduced it to employees at the company's monthly townhall. Our goal was to see if we will receive any ideas at all.

We received 30 ideas overnight, which we considered a great success! This gave us a green light to continue our design.

Running a quick test really helped us see user feedback right away and for us to make quicker decisions.

As for the "coaching" aspect of our platform, we listened to employees and discovered that coaching is 1) recognition from executives and 2) support from experts from other teams

We explored a few conceptual directions, but landed on something we're all familiar with: social media. What if we could turn an idea into a social post so co-workers, executives, and specialists can comment and show support? We did exactly that and even made badges to identify users.

The concept of an efficient idea board + a social media community eventually became the two core values of our idea portal.

Design Iterations

Information architecture was an important step in the process. We wanted get this right because it will define the actual efficiency of the idea portal. It was helpful to collaborate with everyone at this stage because each member had a unique insight to contribute: