RBC Event Calendar
Summary
Background: RBC Digital Services held an internal competition where employees had to select a problem facing fellow employees and solve it by creating an application or website. My 4 person team consisted of a UI Designer, Business Analyst and Front-end Developer. We had 3 weeks to come up with a concept, create a prototype and present our idea to a panel of judges.
Objective: Create an application that helps RBC employees find and sign-up for internal events.
Deliverables: (1) Interactive Demo (2) Presentation
Role: UX Researcher
The Problem: RBC Employees Can't Find Events!
Based on our own personal experiences, we already knew that RBC had great internal events, but they were impossible to find. We decided to validate our assumptions by sending out a 10 question survey to 20 RBC employees to get their opinions. Furthermore, we interviewed 2 RBC employees also asking about their prefrences for attending events and how easy that information was to find. Our data told us that YES RBC employees want to attend a number of events. However, they rarely seem to do so.
Why Can't Events Be Found?
Although RBC does have an Events Calendar, most users did not know it existed or where it was located. When we tested users on the current Events Calendar, they had a lot of difficulty locating events. Furthermore, our user research indicated that RBC employees "don't have time to search for events" and get 90% all their current events emailed to them. Thus, our solution involved not only creating an Events Calendar that was easy navigate, but also one where RBC employees could subscribe to event emails and also share events by email.
Figure 3: Currently, events are dencentralized. RBC employees must navigate through a maze to locate their event (yellow starred). Worst of all, they may pick the wrong maze (platform).
Figure 4: Our solution centralizes all events and furthermore lets RBC employees sign-up for event reminders which decreases the time they would have to spend locating them.
What do RBC Users Want in an Event Calendar?
Our group brainstormed an initial list of user requirements which were based on our interviews and survey data. We came up with a list of 16 user requirements which were prioritized based on the benefit they provided to the user.
Figure 5: Based on our initial research, we created list of user requirements.
Figure 6: We refined our list of user requirements by prioritizing the value they gave to RBC employees.
Paper Prototyping & User Testing
After refining our initial set of user requirements, the UI Designer created a high-fidelity prototype. I tested the paper prototype (consisting of 2 pages) by asking users (1) Based on an initial glance, can you tell me what this site does? and (2) What do you expect to happen when you click X area? Our test demonstrated users clearly understood the intent of our platform as well as which areas were interactive and what they would lead to. However, users did feel that the "more info" (figure 10) needed event contact details.
Figure 7: We recruited 2 users to test our paper prototypes and first asked them about to describe what they were looking at.
Figure 8: We asked users to indicate which sections of the prototype were interactive and what the interaction would lead to.
High Fidelity Prototype
Based on 2 testing sessions, we iterated our prototype to make certain event information more prominent. Our solution provided a clear, easy way for users to navigate to their event based on date and geographic location. Furthermore, users could email events to friends and subscribe to certain types of events.
Outcome
We presented our solution to a panel of judges at an event attended by 80 RBC employees. We came in 1st place winning the opportunity to present our work at RBCs next major town hall.