Amanda Poirier
CASE STUDY
ROLE · Led UI Design TIMELINE · 6 months TEAM · Innovation Director, Project Manager, Me
FINAL EXPERIENCE SCREEN
CONTEXT
A path that feels possible
GP wanted a way for employees to explore career growth internally, using two frameworks the organization already relied on: Clifton Strengths and Working Genius. I joined a three-person team about six months before rollout, working alongside an innovation director and a project manager. Preliminary research and low-fidelity wireframes had already been done before I joined. From that point forward, I owned the UI end to end and contributed directly to usability testing. We built the experience as a live SharePoint site, since it was already the platform employees used company-wide.
THE PROBLEM
Career choices felt abstract
Employees had strengths data sitting in their profiles, but no clear path from “here’s what I’m good at” to “here’s what I could actually do next.” Career resources that did exist were generic and disconnected from the specific strengths employees already had on file. People didn’t need more content. They needed a way to see themselves in a role before they could believe it was worth pursuing.
People didn’t need more content. They needed a way to see themselves in a role before they could believe it was worth pursuing.
THE PROCESS
From personalized to buildable
The original concept was fully personalized: employees would select one to three of their top Clifton Strengths, and the site would surface matches built specifically around that combination. SharePoint’s capabilities couldn’t support that level of dynamic matching, so we pivoted to a grouped model instead. Employees select the bucket their top strength falls into — relationship building, for example — and the site returns a consistent set of strongest, good, and other-path matches for that bucket.
That was a real tradeoff, and I made sure it stayed visible rather than getting buried. Losing individual-level personalization meant losing some precision, but it kept the tool buildable within the platform we had, and it still gave employees a real starting point instead of nothing.
Learn, Read, Build, Do
For every path, we built out a “Learn, Read, Build, Do” section: book recommendations, employees already in that role they could reach out to, and concrete actions to build resume-relevant experience. Each match came with a way to actually move on it: scheduling reflection time directly on their calendar, a template email to open a conversation with a supervisor, and a worksheet to help employees think through what they actually wanted from a career path.
Testing and rollout
We tested the site with five employees in roughly one-hour sessions. I helped shape the testing questions and sat in on every session, then led the changes we made based on what we heard. Once the design held up under that testing, we brought supervisors in separately to preview the tool and think through how they could use it to guide career conversations with their own reports. We ran two lunch-and-learns to walk supervisors through it before rolling the site out to employees company-wide.
Usability Testing
Supervisor Preview
Lunch & Learns
WHAT WE FOUND
The single point of contact
One finding surprised us. We had only included a single point of contact under one career path, almost as an afterthought, not something we expected to register as a standout feature. Employees responded to it more strongly than anything else in that section. Having a real person to reach out to made the path feel possible in a way that book recommendations and resume tips didn’t. We expanded it, adding multiple points of contact under every career path on the site.
POINT-OF-CONTACT BEFORE / AFTER
OUTCOME
A better starting point for growth
Employees noticed the loss of individual personalization and named it directly, which we expected and now treat as a clear direction for a future iteration. But the feedback on the tool as it exists was strong. Employees specifically valued that it didn’t box them into one answer. One person described the difference from a typical strengths quiz this way: it didn’t hand them a single verdict “like a dentist,” when they had zero interest in being a dentist. Being able to explore multiple paths on their own terms, rather than receiving one prescribed outcome, was the thing that made the tool feel usable instead of gimmicky.
After rollout, we tracked how many 1:1 conversations supervisors were having with their reports compared to before the tool existed, and that number went up. We don’t have hard KPIs tied to that increase, but employees also reported feeling more supported, not just by their supervisors but by the company itself for investing in the conversation at all.
Working hypothesis: this kind of visible investment in career growth should support retention over time, though we haven’t tracked that far out yet.