Access Portal

Imagine never having to ask, “What’s the link again?”

Project Brief

Establish a centralized hub that consolidates essential tools and services for employees across Publicis Groupe. This unified page is meant to be accessible to all employees, regardless of agency or geographic location, providing a convenient platform for viewing and updating personal employee information, managing timesheets and expenses, swiftly accessing IT support, engaging in career discussions, and even participating in Marcel-based training courses.

“Love this feature! Just removed a bunch of my old bookmarks!”

— Employee Review, 3 Upvotes

Challenge

The main approach among Publicis Groupe employees for accessing administrative or employee-service links is through bookmarking. To enhance user experience and streamline access to these tools, could we pinpoint a standardized set of services consistently utilized throughout the organization? This could lead to an improved method for users to access and engage with these essential tools more efficiently.

Discovery

The key considerations that played a role in the research process were:

Structured information architecture: Every agency and country is at a different maturity level when it comes to surfacing information about people and their relationship with the organization.
Legal approvals: Legal approvals at a global level require more time than at a specific country or agency level.
User experience and adoption: Optimal user adoption is more likely when the experience resonates with individual brands. Leaders at the agency or country level will spearhead this effort within their respective groups, favoring a customized approach over a universal, blanket change.
Consistency: A common set of services used across the organization will be identified to inform the first phase of the experience.

Design Process

The design journey for Access Portal spanned approximately two months, beginning with the Discovery phase and concluding with the launch. Employing a cross-functional approach, I collaborated in two-week sprints, actively incorporating feedback from both team members and stakeholders. As I transitioned from information architecture and wireframes to the MVP, this iterative process ensured a responsive and well-informed development leading up to the portal's successful launch.

I began by working closely with my product manager and data scientist to understand which services were most commonly used across the organization. From there these services were vetted by our stakeholders and it was then decided, of these services that would be brought in through API calls, which would be view-only versus editable within the platform. I extracted all of this information from powerpoint presentations and excel spreadsheets and created sticky notes in Fig Jam. This resulted in a highly collaborative tool that allowed for myself and team to define the foundational information architecture of this page with ample flexibility which then informed the initial wireframes.
Based on the architecture that was set in the Fig Jam working sessions, I created a set of initial wireframes to gather more feedback from the team regarding UI/UX and how to push the experience forward. One aspect I’d like to highlight about the wireframing process was how helpful it was to work off of the Fig Jam file. During creative reviews I would bounce between wireframes and Fig Jam as well as easily bring Fig Jam sticky notes into the design file during working session as we started to dial-in in the final hierarchy. This working process ensured that we didn’t miss any product requirements and allowed for ample flexibility on the information side which naturally ran parallel to the design of the interface.
After about four rounds of creative reviews, I finalized the layout that would serve as the Access Portal MVP. Throughout the review process we discussed UX writing and the best verbiage to use across this experience that would be understood globally. This was also informed by product teams based in other regions that helped weigh in on common language patterns. Another important point that was discussed was scalability. Knowing that this experience would be rolled out in a phased approach, I wanted to ensure that any added feature enhancements wouldn’t break the layout that had been set. To address this, I opted for dynamic and responsive quick link tiles in which additional links could be added or changed without affecting the grid.

Engagement & Improvement

The deployment of Access Portal on Marcel yielded an impressive user rating of 4 out of 5 stars, reaching over 96,000 regular users. This achievement underscores the platform's success in serving as a unified destination, empowering Groupe employees to efficiently manage their administrative tasks.