Duration
4 weeks
UX & Prototyping Lead
Role
Adobe xD, Illustrator & Audition
Tools
Rapid Prototyping
Skills
Cross-functional collaboration
Stakeholder Management
Cole Weinstein, Podcasting Intern
Team
Alexa Underwood, Legal Intern
Elena Barrera-Waters, DE&I Intern
Cassandra Kicak, Communication and Engagement Manager
Jill Reilly, Government Intern
TL;DR
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At the NFL, I was the prototyping lead and user experience intern on the Internal Communications and Engagement Team. My team was committed to incorporating and integrating Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) principles and practices into all facets of the business.
The ask: Develop a program for the NFL to encourage league employees to engage in meaningful progressive social change
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Through stakeholder interviews, surveys of 400+ employees, and analysing the onboarding process, my team unveiled problems blocking employees from actively engaging in change initiatives.
[1] Employees learned of significant corporate activities and initiatives through sources outside the corporation and were unaware of the leagues’ advocacy for progressive social change.
[2] Leadership didn’t reflect support, participation in and encouragement for employees to engage in social change.
[3] The NFL needed a straightforward method of connecting with its multicultural multi-generational workforce.
[4] Communication silos and fragmented onboarding processes made employees unaware of business culture, communication, and affinity groups.
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How can the NFL promote employee engagement cultivating a culture of progressive social change while educating its workforce?
The ‘NFL Engage’ intranet comprised news related to social justice, a podcast discussion series with top-level management, players and employees, and honed in on affinity group one-pagers for new hires or long-tenured employees who were uninformed of the various groups ensuring accessibility and discoverability.
Since information at the NFL is dispersed and widespread, the intranet had a dedicated events calendar and resources page linking other social justice-related hubs.
Process Detail
NFL Engage is an internal-facing employee-centric website empowering and supporting employees looking to engage in progressive social action and community building.
Whether by joining affinity groups, supporting NFL initiatives or listening to candid conversations between leadership, players and coworkers, employees have resources consolidated to foster an environment where activism and volunteerism are reinforced, celebrated, and aligned to NFL values of respect, integrity, responsibility to learn, and resilience. Presented in front of over 100 NFL employees and key stakeholders, the solution took into account NFL branding, style, and tone as well as the multi-cultural nature of the NFL workforce while keeping costs to a minimum.
Use the embedded Adobe xD file to click through the final redesign. To view the in-depth reasoning for the features implemented, click ‘View Full Solutions’ to explore the high-fi solutions.
Process Deep Dive: If you have time to explore my work, keep reading!
Background
At the NFL, I was the UX and prototyping lead on the Internal Communications and Engagement Team. My team consisted of four other interns and the Internal Communications Manager who acted as a team sponsor.
The league was dedicated to incorporating Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) principles and practices into every aspect of the business. Prior to this project, the communications team uncovered a lack of effort and engagement from employees to get involved in progressive social change initiatives, volunteering or affinity groups.
THE ASK“Develop a program to encourage NFL employees to meaningfully engage in progressive social change.”
Problems Identified
Using the ADAPT framework, our team was able to ask the right questions to identify unmet user needs, explore problems and identify potential solutions.
*Due to my NDA, I can’t show the ADAPT process, so I have summarised the problems uncovered below*
PROBLEM STATEMENTHow can the NFL encourage and support employee engagement while educating and fostering an environment of progressive social change?
Approach
Through stakeholder interviews, surveys of 400+ employees, and analysing the onboarding process, my team ideated on the major problems identified. To mitigate any foreseeable technology constraints, we roped in the engineering and product IT teams early in our prototyping process to collaborate on initial ideas.
I worked on carrying out concepts through various fidelity levels and testing features for further iteration. The research done throughout this project culminated in a final presentation to over 100 NFL employees where we zeroed in on actionable steps for its implementation within the league. The solution took into consideration NFL branding, style, and tone; the varying levels of employees, and upkeep by the internal communication and engagement team while maintaining a low-cost budget. Our team solution received buy-in from the executive team due to its strategic alignment with the project goals and the gaps addressed.
High-fi Solutions
Our group created ‘NFL Engage,’ an internal-facing employee-centric website to house NFL social change and justice-related content. This intranet comprised podcast discussion series with leadership, players, and employees about their participation in social change within/outside the league, news related to social justice initiatives internally and externally, and affinity group one-pagers for new employees and those wanting to keep track of new events and programs. Since information at the NFL is dispersed and widespread, the intranet had a dedicated events calendar and resources page linking other social justice-related hubs.
*Click on each prototype to explore pages*
Homepage
The homepage provides employees with quick links for resources, affinity groups and the company policy, training and documentation intranet— Playbook.
The latest podcasts, social justice news and upcoming events are highlighted and to solve the communication silos between departments, the homepage holds a forum where employees can continue to engage in change dialogue outside of formal meetings and events.
Podcasts were a way for leadership and employees to have open, candid conversations about social justice initiatives within the league or externally. The goal of the podcast series was for leadership to emphasise their commitment to social causes while lifting the voices of employees and the causes they care about. These discussions included directors, managers, and even players.
Podcasts
The news page is where employees can catch up and learn about NFL-based social justice initiatives. These articles are curated from NFL news, and other sources covering the league like ESPN, Bleacher Report, and NBC.
This news page ensures that leadership has a specific space to share endeavours with employees in addition to email correspondence.
News
The NFL has over 40+ Twitter pages for social justice making it difficult to keep track of. The Tweet Deck is intended to display 20 of the most recent tweets which are updated every hour allowing employees to have a consolidated space to read them.
News: Tweet Deck
Employees within the NFL are actively taking part in progressive social change, however, predominantly outside the league. The employee spotlight gives them a chance to underscore their passion. Spotlights give a chance for other employees to be educated about different causes their colleagues participate in.
News: Employee Spotlight
Early on in the research process, we pinpointed a major issue with the affinity group one-pagers, they were all PDFs linked to Playbook. With NFL Engage, we wanted the affinity groups to be front and centre while being easily accessible. The one-pagers held the mission/vision statement, group statistics, leadership, and upcoming events for that month alongside contact information.
Affinity Groups
The discoverability of content within the NFL infrastructure was extremely difficult so our group addressed that by pulling together and hyperlinking all social justice resources into one space for employees to have as a reference.
Resources
The newsletter consolidates the monthly updates that have been made to the website. Through a survey of 400 NFL employees, 85% of them preferred email communication over phone calls or face-to-face interactions. The prototype shows the first rollout of the newsletter introducing NFL Engage, what resources the website offers and the released podcast discussion series.
The monthly newsletter will include employee spotlights, showcase major events for the month, and list the overall goals of all the affinity groups and how to get involved.
Monthly Newsletter
Project Learnings & Iterations
Not everything has to be pixel-perfect: If I could go back in time, I would have placed less emphasis on pixel-perfect designs during my initial discussions with engineers and focused more on clearly demonstrating the goal and function of a feature.
In-person year-round events: The next iteration of NFL Engage would explore in-person cultural events, change seminars, and employee-led discussion panels centred around the NFL calendar year.
Reflection
1. Don't design to create more problems: This was the first UX project I led and it taught me that design is essential to solutions. Design must be conducted deliberately, attentively leveraging research since it has the ability to solve problems or pave the way for bigger ones.
2. Auto-layout is your friend: Looking back on this project, I used Adobe xD. Years later, after switching to Figma and learning how to use auto-layout to my advantage, I can assess my younger designer self and find minor inconsistencies that could have been corrected with better attention to detail.
3. All audiences benefit from clickable prototypes: When presenting our final solutions, having a clickable prototype made it simple to provide a casual walkthrough when someone wondered about a feature's particular function.