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Rockworld Leader Portal

UX Research

Project Overview

The RockWorld Leader Portal is an internal resource hub created for team leaders at Rocket to support leadership responsibilities and provide centralized access to tools, information, and updates. This UX research project sought to understand whether team leaders were aware of the portal, how they were utilizing it in their day-to-day workflows, and whether it effectively met their needs as a resource. I conducted this research to generate user-backed insights that would directly inform a UX designer’s design decisions and improvements. Through qualitative user interviews, the project uncovered gaps in awareness, content, and usability, with a specific focus on differences between new and seasoned leaders. The findings helped translate real leader needs into actionable design recommendations to improve clarity, relevance, and overall adoption of the portal.

My Role

UX Researcher
 
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Research Process

Objective
Plan
Methods
Conduct
Synthesis

Objective

Why is this project important?

Internal tools only create value if employees are aware of them, trust them, and integrate them into their daily workflows. The RockWorld Leader Portal was intended to support team leaders, yet without a clear understanding of awareness and usage, there was a risk of underutilization, duplicated efforts, and leaders relying on inconsistent or informal sources of information. This project helped surface gaps between the portal’s intended purpose and actual leader behavior, ensuring future improvements could be grounded in real needs rather than assumptions. Ultimately, the research supported more effective leadership enablement, better communication, and stronger adoption of internal resources at Rocket.

Target Insights

  • 🔍 Awareness & Usage
    How leaders discover and currently use the Leader Portal

  • 📂 Content Gaps
    Resources leaders feel are missing or hard to find

  • ⭐ Desired Content
    What leaders want added to better support their role

  • 💡 Perceived Value
    How useful the portal feels in day-to-day leadership work

  • ⏳ Experience-Based Needs
    Differences between new leaders vs. seasoned leaders

Methods

  • 👥 Participants: 7 team leaders from various business areas and leadership tenures

  • ⏱ Session Length: 30 minutes per interview

  • 💬 Format: 1:1 semi-structured interviews

  • 🔍 Activities:

    • Asked open-ended questions about workflows and resource needs

    • Guided participants to explore the RockWorld Leader Portal

    • Observed ability to find resources and noted pain points

  • 📊 Analysis: Identified patterns, usability issues, and gaps to inform design recommendations

I followed a qualitative research approach focused on direct feedback from team leaders. I identified and recruited leaders across multiple business areas at Rocket, ensuring a mix of tenure and leadership experience to capture diverse perspectives. After defining clear target insights and research objectives, I designed a semi-structured interview guide to allow for both consistency and open-ended exploration. Interviews were conducted, documented, and synthesized to identify recurring themes, patterns, and differences in needs between newer and more experienced leaders. Findings were then translated into actionable insights and opportunities for improving the Leader Portal.

Findings

Findings on Usage

  • 📚 Variety of Use: Users access the Leader Portal for multiple resources, including:

    • Drive & TRS reference

    • Leading training and development

    • Developing people

    • Team activities

    • Leader-to-Team Member resources

  • ❌ Non-Usage:

    • 1 of 7 users no longer uses the portal

    • 1 of 7 users had never used it

ROCKWORLD LEADER PORTAL (2)_edited.png

Findings on Awareness

  • How did users hear about the leader portal?

    • Majority of users came across the leader portal by navigating around rockworld

    • Others learned about the leader portal through emails/leader launch classes

  •  1 user hadn’t heard about it at all

Findings on Interest in Leader Specific News

  • 📰 Question Asked: Would leaders be interested in receiving leader-specific news in the future?

  • ✅ Response: More than half of the users expressed interest in receiving leader-specific news, indicating an opportunity to increase engagement and provide targeted updates for leaders.

  • 💡Insights: Users are interested in Leader Specific news as long as it’s not noisy and pertains to them and their specific business area.

    • ​“If it’s specific to me and what I need to know. Otherwise, it may be too noisy on top of everything else we receive as leaders.”

Findings on Core Dates/Deadlines/Reminders

  • ⏰ Current Management: 5 of 7 users rely on emails/Outlook to manually track deadlines and reminders

  • 💬 User Feedback:

    • “Things come up as an email. Now I know about it, then I forget about it. Now it’s behind.”

    • “We’re always reminding each other when things are due and if no one remembers, then no one does it.”

    • “I flag stuff but I don’t ever go back and unflag, so it becomes cluttered.”

  • 💡 Insights: Manual tracking leads to missed deadlines, clutter, and reliance on team reminders, indicating a need for better deadline management within the portal.

Findings on Interest in a Search Feature

  • 🔎 Search Within Leader Portal: About 70% of users want the ability to search specifically within the Leader Portal

  • 🌐 Search Through RockWorld: About 30% of users are satisfied searching through the broader RockWorld portal

  •  💡 Insight: Users value targeted search for leader-specific content but still rely on general RockWorld searches for broader Team Member resources, highlighting an opportunity for a dedicated, efficient search feature.

UX Recommendations

Landing Page

  • Users mentioned incorporating a landing page for the Leader Portal

  •  Main page with description of subcategories

  •  Current Flow: Users must click a menu item in the drop-down

ROCKWORLD LEADER PORTAL (3).png

Quicklinks

  • 6/7 leaders expressed interest in a quick links section

  • Some links that leaders are interested in seeing are:

  •  Deadlines, Performance Reviews, Spread The News, Trainings, FAQ, Journey.

Content and Design Strategy

This section was developed by my teammates and centers on the content and design strategy, both of which were shaped by the research and insights from my work.

Feature Priority List

Screen Shot 2026-01-20 at 12.47_edited.j

Current Design & Categorized Redesign

Screen Shot 2026-01-20 at 12.47.58 PM.png

Rockworld Leader Portal Redesign

Screen Shot 2026-01-20 at 1.21.23 PM.png

Conclusion

In conclusion, this project provided valuable insight into how team leaders perceive, discover, and use the RockWorld Leader Portal. Through user interviews and analysis, key gaps were identified in awareness, navigation, and information retrieval, highlighting opportunities to better align the portal with real user needs. The research findings directly informed content prioritization and design strategy decisions, ensuring that proposed improvements were grounded in user behavior rather than assumptions. Overall, this project reinforced the importance of research-led design and demonstrated how thoughtful UX research can drive more effective, usable, and impactful internal tools.

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