Kanekto

Kanekto is an HR Technology company focused on creating an infrastructure for companies to leverage untapped internal resources to upskill the employee talent pool and unify everyone around each company’s mission and vision.

Background

The customer Problem

During the COVID-19 pandemic, companies struggled to retain talent, hire new employees, and keep everyone united. HR leadership at these companies sought ways to build company culture, create new fun ways for employees to interact in a remote work environment, and strengthen their talent pool.

The business Problem

When the CEO of Kanekto approached me, the product was only an idea in his head. He already had secured funding and a few large enterprise companies signed up for a beta launch in eight months and wanted a platform built and fully functional in time for an alpha launch in six months.

The largest financial driver for the platform would be workshops so the driving goal would be to make it easy for people to sign up for workshops.

The Solution

build a mobile-responsive platform for users to take workshops & find mentors

Throughout several meetings, I took the stakeholders through a series of exercises to determine what was needed to create a minimum viable product. This was done through the creation of personas, user stories, user journeys, and the eventual building of an initial information architecture. Once a minimum viable product was built I ran extensive user-tests with a beta-customer to gather feedback and optimize the platform.

Given the scope of what was to be created, I knew it would be critical to design a site map and page linking structures as a foundation for Kanektos functionality. I took the initiative to draft and implement a map that would enhance everyday user flows to ensure ease of use for the customer.

Customer Portal Site Map

Build a design system that scales

With a six-month alpha and eight-month beta timeline, I developed a design system to:

• Streamline design management across projects

• Enable rapid design replication through standardized components

• Shift design focus from visual tweaking to solving complex problems

• Ensure visual and functional design consistency

• Reduce miscommunication and wasted design/development time

The goal was to create a robust library of components, colors, and typography that would serve as a foundational design infrastructure.

Optimizing User Flows

When the onboarding process was initially conceived Kanketo’s program development department wanted to collect as much information about each user as possible to help them better determin what types of workshops to offer up. With this in mind, onboarding had several steps for collecting personal/professional information.

Early usability testing showed clear indicators that there were too many steps between sign on and getting to the workshop marketplace so I decision was made to direct users to the workshop marketplace directly after the “Almost there” message instead of first showing them the home page. This had the added advantage of giving the users little doubt about what their first goal uplon initially signing up would be - signing up for their first workshop.

After alpha testing it was clear that the onboarding was still too tiring for the users. While the program development team did want to collect data, their real goal was to get people signed up for their first workshop, so a decision was made to drop two more steps. After this choice, onboarding fatigue decreased significantly and the rate of signing up for an initial workshop jumped by 2x.

The Platform

Get quick updates on platform activity

The homepage offers an overview of activities for workshops, clubs, and mentorships. Via the main navigation, users can find and join workshops or clubs, follow peers, and find mentors for career growth. They also see notifications from their groups and mentors. The sidebar provides fast access to future workshops, and the main newsfeed shows posts and suggests relevant workshops. Alpha and beta tests helped streamline and prioritize key page features to reduce clutter.

Create a way for users to find workshops, Match with mentors, & More

One of the most popular features of Kanekto is workshops. Each workshop was led by expert guides for small groups of individuals within a company. By having small numbers of participants, bonding between people became easier and people were more likely to participate actively. We built an easy-to-use marketplace for these workshops where people could search, sort, and filter through the wide array of offerings and preview highlights via video. They could easily see what their peers were participating in and get recommendations for workshops to take.

SIGN UP FOR WORKSHOPS

Once users select a workshop, they can go to an individual workshop page to get more information about the class overall and a session-to-session agenda. From the workshop page, they can sign up, mark a workshop as a favorite to track it for the future, add the workshop to their calendar, see who else is taking a workshop, learn about the workshop guide, find related in-company clubs to join, post on discussion boards, and more.

Video conference portal for workshop sessions

As the vast majority of workshops were designed to be virtual so employees from different office locations could attend at the same time, I designed a video conference software portal for Kanekto.

Outcome

Kanekto was able to launch the the beta product with their first live and paying customers on time. Initial buzz from those involved was very positive. Initial success lead to further development of new workshop products to further grow the platform