Duration

9.2023 - 12.2023 (3 Months)

My Role

Team Lead & UIUX Designer
(4-person team)

Design Role

Research, Design Systems, Prototyping,
End-to-End Experience, Usability Testing,
UI Design, Visual & Branding

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Overview

Addressing the critical gap between diversity and genuine inclusion within META's workforce by integrating AI-driven solutions into everyday activities 🥣

Recognizing that inclusion involves more than just assembling diverse teams, Metch is designed as a social dining app specifically for Meta employees to enhance workplace inclusion. It matches users based on their profiles, facilitating fun, approachable, and authentic ice-breaking lunch meet-ups during workdays.

By incorporating AI-driven games + activities with rewards (extrinsic motivation), Metch incentivizes genuine interactions and connections among employees as well as contributing to a more richer, and more inclusive database for the company. It aims to revolutionize Meta's workplace by breaking down social bubbles and fostering a sense of belonging among employees, redefining the dynamics of workplace integration.

The value of Inclusion in the Workplace

In the current business climate, inclusion has been a top priority in the workplace and the demand for inclusion has increased 20% in 2020. Inclusion not only uphold moral values but also contribute significantly to a company's financial success. Research consistently shows inclusive workplaces are 6 times more likely to be innovative and twice as likely to meet or surpass financial goals than non inclusive ones.

Given today’s context, especially after the COVID-19 economic crisis, inclusion matter even more than ever.

Starting Question

Why are new hires still feeling left out and excluded, even though Meta is implementing inclusion initiatives and DEI statistic has shown an overall improvement in employee diversity?

With this question in mind, our team conducted secondary research and concluded that only diversity is improved, but not inclusion. What Meta has achieved is just putting many types of people in the same room without teaching them how to interact with others. Given that, we would like to facilitate an more comfortable environment and create an optimal experience for new hires to fit in social interactions smoothly and feel included at Meta.

Research Process

Our team set off to understand the scope of the problem as inclusion is a big topic. In the discovery stage, we started with secondary research to understand the differences between diversity and inclusion, the premises of inclusive practices, and relevant reviews. This helps us frame our questions for our users and stakeholders and collect authentic experiences and feelings of inclusion practices from diverse perspectives.

It was only through interviews that we understood why some inclusion efforts seemed ineffective and identified nuanced insights that might have been missing in our surveys. In the synthesis stage, our team identified the patterns of challenges and user needs, narrowing down opportunity areas to focus on. This enabled us to crystallize and define our idea, pinpointing new hires as our key group of end-users and formulating feasible "How Might We" statements and design implications.

Research Methodologies

In total, we conducted 8 interviews: 2 postgraduates, 2 new hires, and 1 Team Lead, aiming to understand how inclusion is perceived in the workplace by both leaders and employees. We then interviewed 3 Meta employees to grasp their experiences of Meta's workplace culture and inclusion efforts.

Simultaneously, we examined Glassdoor reviews, company reports, databases, and published materials, grounding our study in the rich context of Meta inclusion efforts, overall employees’ sentiment and reviews. Additionally, we leveraged over 30 responses from Meta employee surveys to guide us through the diverse landscape of employee opinions regarding the effectiveness of these implementations and expectations for improvements.

Discoveries

Needs/Wants

• Interesting teambuilding activities
• Channels to break the ice with other departments
• Safe place to propose, ask questions, and seek for feedback
• Mentorship programs that has someone who had similar issues/backgrounds to talk

Insights#1: A perception Gap

The research findings highlighted a significant perception gap in the value of inclusion initiatives between leadership and employees. Meta DEI report showcases its numerical achievements, suggesting progress in employee diversity. However, employee reviews and surveys reveal a stark contrast. They perceive these achievements as tokenism, resembling public relations efforts rather than authentic commitment.

The mismatched implementations with real issues such as difficulty in breaking the ice in the social interactions, noted in interviews and surveys, also reveals employees' feelings of exclusion and the lack of assessment, with programs failing to measure less tangible aspects of inclusion and address diverse needs among employees. It leads to ineffective practices that cannot help people feel included, indicating the insufficient consideration of users' real needs and disparity in the perceived value of inclusion. It underlines the critical importance of understanding user experiences and focusing more on qualities beyond quantities.

Insights#2: Overwhelming workload

There is common theme of concern among employees - the lack of in-person interactions due to busy work schedules and the silo nature of teams. Reviews from Glassdoor highlighted that the team setup and work nature tend to be in a silo which is one of the reasons for the lack of cross-team interactions, and many interactions happen only within the team itself.

This sentiment is echoed during our interviews with META employees, who highlighted a desire for more connections outside their team. Our user survey also highlighted challenges they faced when joining the company: an overwhelming workload and a lack of in-person interaction.

Employees also feedback that they rarely have the opportunity to interact with the colleagues in a social setting. Therefore, we can conclude that employees do enjoy interaction and forming connections, and META has been implementing various inclusive practices to help people bond and connect. However, the reality of the workplace makes it hard for people to connect outside their direct work and teams.

Insights#3: desire for more connections

The research and psychological theory showed another interesting fact: this longing for deeper connections isn't merely about personal contentment. The connection does help to nurture a more engaged and inclusive work ambiance, with most respondents saying that they feel more included in the company because of their friends and connections.

Another trend from our interviews individuals desire to form connections beyond mere work tasks. Comments from respondents highlighted the lack of shared interests beyond work – where respondents are yearning for authentic and valuable interactions.

This shows that people are not always work-orientated, underscoring the essence of quality in professional relationships. This is echoed by a piece on Forbes that highlights that the strongest relationship develops when people can be themselves. The article further highlights the importance of building meaningful relationships rather than spreading oneself thin across numerous networking events.

Conclusion

Design Implications

Concept Development

Based on our key insights, META employees are generally busy and they would prefer a convenient and interesting way to meet people instead of relying on post work events. In addition, due to the vast nature of the office and organization, it is hard for people to connect with colleagues in other social bubbles as it is time consuming. Therefore, our team decided to leverage on using meal time for people to interact since eating is a daily event and this would not take up office hours and design an application targeted to Meta employees, incorporating quick ice-breaking games to help our users reach out to many colleagues across META who may share similar interests and values.

✦ Solution ✦

Metch - A social dining App that pairs employees up with their colleagues to grab lunch together during workdays

Key Features

The app aims to increase Meta’ inclusion by helping people to get out their social bubbles, break ice with strangers, contribute to the inclusion dataset, get rewards with free lunch, and share their experiences to the community.

To be specific, firstly, Metch will assign users with 2 or 3 lunch buddies who might share similar interests and preferences and is going to the same restaurant at the same time. Secondly, Metch uses AI games to help our users break the ice with each other by identifying shared interests, fostering interactions and contributing to Meta inclusion dataset, which will help the company have a better understanding of the Meta community and improve inclusion effort in Meta. Moreover, Metch incorporates incentives such as rewards lunch discounts and provides options to share their experience to help promote this initiative and encourage more people to participate.

Metch X AI-Driven Game

Metch will incorporate an AI-powered Charade (word-guessing) game to help users break the ice and help the company build a more inclusive dataset. With people consent, users’ inputs of the game will be used to train the inclusion dataset through Google Teachable Machine. Here is how Google Teachable Machine looks.

How Metch X AI works

By playing the word-guessing game, the AI will be able to capture how different people intepret certain words or terms. This will then help the AI build a better understanding of any similarities and differences across culture/background. Consequently, the more people play the games, the more accurate the AI bot can learn, and the more inclusive input it can recognize. Since the AI bot is built by the data produced by Meta employees, it will help to build a better understanding of the Meta community. Every data people contribute will help the AI bot become more diverse and inclusive.

Storyboard

The storyboard depicts the experience of Alex who just moved to a new city to join META. Even though joining the onboarding process and getting welcome by the team, Alex still often feels lonely. Luckily, Alex found out the application “METCH”in the META elevator and decided to give “METCH” a try. The app allowed Alex to meet fellow META employees with similar interests to share a meal together. This helped Alex to connect with people that she would never be able to meet if it wasn’t for the app, this helped her make friends across META, which made her feel more included.

Low-Fi prototype

Mid-Fi prototype