Knowledge Sharing Platform

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My role in the project at a glance

I joined this existing project as a UX researcher for a limited time period. With no prior UX metrics or documented design decisions in place, I conducted comprehensive research including UX audits, user interviews, and usability testing of the current platform. At the end of the research phase, I prepared and delivered a presentation to business stakeholders, clearly connecting insights with business outcomes. This directly influenced product decisions and prioritization, ensuring the team focused on improvements with the greatest impact for both users and the product.

Context

The XChange Workshops platform was created as a response to the internal needs of global pharmaceutical company with over 100,000 employees worldwide. The platform's purpose was to facilitate knowledge sharing across the organization through employee participation in workshops.

How does the XChange Workshops works?

The platform's core functionality allows employees to create and register for workshops. Workshop creators can set up sessions that are either open to all employees or restricted to specific groups, manage session details, and assign facilitators. Participants can browse through available workshops, register for sessions that interest them, or join mandatory training sessions they are required to attend.

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Knowledge Sharing Platform

Challenges →

Defining the research process →

Discovery →

Analysis of gathered data →

Outcomes →

Final thoughts →

Challenges

The platform was created two years before I joined the team, although the team was continuously developing the tool by adding new features, the UX perspective of the product was neglected. Since the platform's release 2 years ago, no UX research had been performed and no metrics had been set or analyzed.

Limited understanding of user needs and behaviors

Initially, I was brought on to design new features. However, once I joined the team, I quickly uncovered several critical UX issues. The platform also lacked proper documentation to explain past design decisions and showed limited understanding of user needs, behaviors, and journeys. The team was receiving numerous feature requests and needed help prioritizing them based on actual user needs.

Given these circumstances, I advised against implementing new complex features immediately. Instead, I proposed a two-month intensive UX research phase to properly evaluate current user experiences, identify pain points, and create a data-driven prioritization framework for future improvements.

Defining the research process

Every project requires an individual approach. After joining the XChange Workshops project, I discussed the immediately noticed usability issues with stakeholders and the team. Instead of rushing to implement new features, product owner decided to take a step back and focus on understanding our users better. Together, we agreed on a two-month intensive UX research phase.

The goals of the research was to understand:

creator persona perspective, the needs, pain points

why new users need training to use the platform

why even experienced users frequently ask for assistance

why certain features are less used than expected by business side, what can be improved to meet users needs

Next steps

Given the limited two-month timeframe, we agreed to produce an actionable table instead of a traditional report, as this was the most effective way to enable clear prioritization of identified pain points based on collected research data.

Discovery

Considering limited 2 months long time frame to conduct research and provide actionable results, we decided for three research methodologies: UX Audit, Desk Research, Usability testing sessions.

UX Audit

I conducted a thorough UX audit to evaluate the platform against established design principles, guidelines, and heuristics. This systematic approach helped identify fundamental usability issues that users might encounter while navigating the platform. The audit was particularly valuable as a starting point, revealing both immediate concerns and potential problem areas that required further investigation through user testing. Below are some key findings from the audit.

👇 Key UX Audit findings👇

Accessibility issues

Multiple instances of insufficient color contrast between grey text and white backgrounds that do not meet WCAG 2.1 guidelines (minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1)

Missing alternative text for interactive elements and images

Keyboard navigation is inconsistent across different sections of the platform

Focus indicators are either missing or barely visible in some interactive elements. These accessibility issues make the platform difficult to use for people with visual impairments or those who rely on assistive technologies.

Information hierarchy and element proximity issues

The session setup pop-up displays information in an illogical order. Essential elements like date and time should be positioned at the top, followed by description and related materials grouped together. The facilitator information should be placed above guest details due to its higher importance in the workflow.

Error prevention issues

The system currently allows users to schedule sessions for past dates, which leads to errors (users must either delete the session or refresh the page to recover). The system should prevent this type of error by not allowing users to select past dates when scheduling sessions.

Inefficient workflows and deviations from standard patterns

After saving a workshop's description and details, users cannot immediately publish or unpublish it. These actions are hidden within the edit menu, requiring additional clicks and making the workflow less efficient. This deviates from common design patterns where publish/unpublish actions are readily accessible.

Lack of consistency and clarifications in context

The platform uses several user roles - facilitator, host, creator, guest, and participant - but provides no explanations of their permissions or responsibilities. Furthermore, the icons displayed next to these roles are potentially misleading This ambiguity may leads to confusion about user permissions and responsibilities, making it difficult for users to understand their capabilities.

Desk research

One of the challenges encountered while working on this project was a small amount of documentation that would clarify design decisions that were taken while designing the initial version of the product. Desk research included talking to the team and support about common users problems, reviewing workshops scheduled by users on production.

Reviewing production data

While reviewing production data, significant issue with workshop visibility settings was discovered. In several cases, workshop descriptions indicated they were open for anyone to join, but their settings were actually configured as 'invite-only,' preventing user registration. Further investigation revealed that after creating a workshop, the visibility setting (open vs. invite-only) was difficult to locate and modify. Additionally, the system failed to notify creators when a workshop was set to 'invite-only' but had no invited participants, potentially resulting in empty workshops.

Talking with support team

Discussions with the support team revealed that workshop creators frequently face difficulties when creating new sessions. One of the most common issues reported was inability of adding sessions to the Agenda during the initial workshop setup. This insight prompted further investigation during our usability testing sessions, with detailed findings described in the following sections.

Usability testing

We conducted usability testing sessions with users having diverse experience with the system, starting from very little experienced users who guide colleagues. The main part of scenario focused on:

Regular session creation

Break-out session creation

Editing sessions’ details

Users struggle to differentiate between system roles and their permissions (Participants vs Guests and Facilitators vs Hosts)

👇 Identified insights based on usability testing sessions 👇

Users expressed a need for two distinct roles in the system: a co-creator role with edit rights, and a host role for those who lead workshops but shouldn't have editing permissions. Users frequently described scenarios where someone helps organize their workshop by filling in descriptions and adding participants, or creates the workshop on their behalf. They then review and make final edits in XChange Workshops.

Users have difficulty managing workshop schedules and understanding scheduling implications

👇 Identified insights based on usability testing sessions 👇

Users often schedule sessions with long breaks in between to accommodate different time zones. Additionally, many workshops have only one session per day scheduled. The current requirement to set time frames for each workshop day adds unnecessary complexity without providing any real value to users or customers.

Analysis of gathered data

After gathering raw data from the research phase - including notes, recordings, transcriptions, and initial hypotheses - it was time to interpret and summarize the findings. To facilitate transforming the data into actionable insights supported by facts, I created a structured analysis grid based on usability testing results and organized findings in Miro.

Analysis grid in Miro organizing research findings

The below Miro frames illustrate research analysis of a one of identified usability issue with the time picker logic. During session scheduling, users encountered a frustrating limitation where they were unable to modify a session's start time due to grayed out, unclickable hour options.

Analysis of one of the issues in Miro

The time picker's logic deviated significantly from industry standards, causing several usability issues:

Users had to change the end time first before modifying the start time, as the system prevented start times from exceeding end times

Users often assumed either another session was blocking the time slot or there were restricted hours in place

As a workaround, users would completely delete and recreate sessions from the Agenda view just to set their desired start time

The recommended solution was to preserve the session duration when changing start times. This way, when users modified the start time, the end time would automatically adjust to maintain the same duration.

Outcomes

The comprehensive UX research phase uncovered 54 distinct usability issues across the XChange Workshops platform. These findings were methodically documented in a detailed analysis grid, incorporating data from UX audits, desk research, and usability testing sessions.

Key issues included:

Accessibility concerns with color contrast and screen reader compatibility

Confusing role management and permission systems

Complex workshop scheduling workflows

Inconsistent information hierarchy

Instead of a formal report, I created a prioritized actionable file gathering issues, categorized by severity, design/implementation complexity, and potential impact on user experience. Alongside the documentation, I conducted presentations for business stakeholders, clearly connecting research findings with business outcomes. These sessions directly influenced which improvements were prioritized first, ensuring that the team focused on changes with the highest impact for both users and the company.

Following this prioritization, I worked closely with business stakeholders and the development team to address the most urgent issues. Less complex, high-priority problems were solved quickly, while more complex challenges—such as role management and scheduling logic—were placed on the roadmap for additional research and deeper design iterations.

Final thoughts

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What I learnt from this project

Joining an established project presents unique challenges - from understanding undocumented design decisions to piecing together historical context from various team members

Setting clear research scope, methodology and deliverables at the beginning is essential for managing stakeholder expectations within time constraints

Even simple issues caused by not following industry guidelines can result in severe user problems, as demonstrated by the time-picker example in this case study

Communication and using business language is a key when talking with stakeholders: it it's possible to secure additional research time even when unplanned, and to demonstrate why certain issues need deeper investigation and longer design phases with iterations to deliver the best customer experience

Thank you for your time! 👀

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