iLearn platform
Enhancing User Experience in Existing UI Design Systems to Boost User Engagement
As one of the world’s biggest mining operators, First Quantum Minerals is committed to delivering their people the best possible experience. That might be whilst working on-site in Panama, sitting in the office in London, or signing in remotely from home.
It’s therefore critical that the technology that these employees interact with demonstrates the values that First Quantum wants them to have: quality, attention to detail, boldness. Since their suite of talent apps is a regular touch point for staff, it’s an important place to project this culture of excellence.
In search of a London based digital design studio that could create something bold yet elegant, First Quantum approached Browser to oversee the UX design of their suite of talent apps. The starting point was their online learning platform: iLearn.
The Brief
Helping their people to grow by offering high-quality training is key to how First Quantum operates. Running a mine requires many skills, hard and soft, so it is essential that they provide employees with the resources they need to learn and improve.
iLearn was conceptualised to be a space focused on levelling up leaders. It is the place where employees, managers and team leaders can come to brush up on what it takes to be excellent at their job.
Whilst the existing platform was designed, built, and performed well, Browser was tasked with adding new features and functions to the existing platform, without compromising the minimalist, easy-to-use nature of the platform by over complicating it.
Adding new features to an existing system
The first initiative that we were tasked with was to allow managers to drill down into more detail when feeding back on the strengths and weaknesses of their direct report. The tutorials that the users sees would be based on this feedback, so the more detailed it could be, the more personalised the learning content would be.
From initial ideation workshops with First Quantum and the awesome guys at Without Studio (the branding and ideation agency), it became clear that using the existing grid component would provide the most elegant approach, using elements that the user is already familiar with. Here we introduced a mechanism whereby a manager could drill down into the strength that they thought their direct report should develop further.
This concept was rapidly built into a clickable prototype by our UX design team and was tested on users and managers to understand how it would be received. After some initial tweaks, the concept was successful and that gave us the confidence to continue building out the additional design.
Creating production ready designs
Once the design was tested and the design built out, we needed to get it into a state where it could be handed over to the partner development team at Genisys.
Using Figma, our design team created high-fidelity, interactive prototypes that demonstrated all the animations and transitions required in the application, plus release notes that detailed how the functions operated. These prototypes were used to present to stakeholders within First Quantum in order to get buy-in, and were then handed over to the IT team at Genisys Group so they could get a sense of hovers, animations and transitions, as well as the detail documented in the design files.
The result was an incredibly detailed file documenting every component and page of the app, leaving nothing to interpretation.
The outcome
At the end of the first year of the programme, almost every leader at First Quantum completed their personalised course. The reaction to having a course selected for you based on the manager’s more detailed recommendations was good, and consistent with the testing that we carried out in the early stages of the design process.
In the coming years we’ll continue to monitor course completion rates, as well as lagging indicators such as employee satisfaction with training methods. For the immediate future we turned our attention to the rest of First Quantum Minerals talent suite: Assess and the CEO Programme.