9.2023 - 12.2023 (3 Months)
Team Lead & UIUX Designer
(4-person team)
Research, Design Systems, Prototyping,
End-to-End Experience, Usability Testing,
UI Design, Visual & Branding
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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.
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.
As one of the leading companies, META has recognized the importance of diversity and inclusion in its corporate culture. According to Media Diversity Institute & Meta 2022 Report, we can see that META’s strong commitment to inclusion, in both hiring process and investment.
Despite considerable efforts to enhance diversity within its workforce, challenges remain in fostering genuine inclusion, particularly among new hires who struggle to integrate socially and culturally. Majority of them found it challenging to engage in social interactions, break the ice with others, and have to change themselves to fit in.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
based on Usability Testing & Heuristic Evaluation
After the sign in prompt, the user goes through a signup process. The lack of system status on the page and the tedious sign up process will make the user wonder if the sign up process will be long and if there are options to explore the page without signing in or signing up.
The application lacks clear options for users to exit or skip unwanted states, such as accidental matches or the opportunity to do a rematching. This forces the user into undesirable situation where they are forced to follow through with an undesirable match. In addition, there is no opportunity to skip the ice-breaking games which may not be suitable for busy individual who doesnt care about the discount
Beside providing a help button, the application could use a proactive help function, such as an onboarding tutorial, to help users get familiar with the interface and help our users gain proficiency with the application.
By manually keying in their interests, the user introduce another element of error. any typo or weird preference may result in a catastrophic error where the user may not be able to find a match.
There are many games for the users to choose from. The options may cause our users to suffer from the paradox of choice as any poor choice made by them may result in them being unable to win the discount coupon for the meal.
It occurred during the analysis stage when our team was overwhelmed with diverse and divergent insights on various inclusive implementations. Our international backgrounds prompted a mindset shift in perspective, drawing from our own experiences of entering unfamiliar environments and discovering the perception gap in inclusion among different groups and the absence of ice-breaker for interaction. We shifted our focus to create comfortable environments for employee connections instead of focusing on formal inclusion programs.
During the prototyping stage, I found it’s challenging but intriguing to translate users’ feedback into a design solution that can maintain a clear visual hierarchy while also addressing users' pain points. By incorporating dynamic color schemes, clear layouts, intuitive call-to-actions, etc, we finally made a well-crafted prototype that could seamlessly guide users through visual elements with clarity and purpose. I realized successful design goes beyond aesthetics. It is a strategic arrangement of visual elements that leads the viewer through a user journey effortlessly.
In the research stage, our team works well by establishing clear responsibilities and tasks for each person ahead of time and arrange to meet in person in a weekly manner to keep everyone on the same page. We talked about our strengths and skills during the 1st meeting, making it efficient to assign tasks according to individual expertise, enhancing our project efficiency and the quality of the work produced. Also, through open communication, we recognize and appreciate individual efforts and exchange ideas, feedback, challenges and solutions in time, leading to innovative solutions and creative problem-solving in time. It also results in a supportive team vibe where everyone contributes equally and feels value.
In our collaborative efforts on ideating design solutions based on research insights, the convergence of each unique perspectives of our team toward an effective design solution impressed me. The intersection of our individual insights and expertise formed a comprehensive and innovative approach. Each member contributing their strengths like visual design, logical thinking, even time management, especially with the time constraints and heavy workload, not only enriched the design process but also led to an creative and problem-solving design solution/product that goes beyond what any individual could have achieved.
The lack of clarity in our initial survey objectives and questions resulted in repetitive work. I found ourselves constantly revising the survey with ongoing research. It caused delays in its distribution and limited our ability to recruit an adequate number of respondents. So I would like to allocate more time to comprehensive secondary research to understand the nuances of the inclusion at Meta beforehand to define our precise goals and target users, crafting more focused, targeted survey questions and ensure each question will contribute directly to our opportunity areas.