No. 02
Interaction Design
ING Digital Obeya
We adapted the Obeya into a digitally navigable version that gives a team a 360-degree view of its own status, without anyone needing to be in the building.
Role
UX Designer
Timeline
2 months
Team
Felipe Isabel, Anukriti Mishra
Year
2024
The problem & the user
The Challenge
Customer Experience Enablement (CXE) is made up of multiple workstreams. Some are operational and cyclical, others are transformation projects and far less predictable, so no single reporting format could fit both. Nothing was automated either, which meant every update was assembled by hand, and status updates had become long meetings that drained the productivity they were meant to track.
The User
Stakeholders included our colleagues across Infrastructure & Engineering, management, and the CXE team itself. Management needed a clearer read on status and blockers; the team needed updates that were quick to produce and still worth looking at. None of them could be assumed to know our deliverables, so the Obeya had to explain itself rather than depend on someone being there to narrate it.
In numbers
8
workstreams reporting into one space, across operations and transformation.
104
individual updates gathered manually across six months.
78
hours spent in status meetings across six months, before the Obeya.
The approach & process
01
Situated Design
Each week, I would spend time embedded in a different part of CXE. I worked directly with each workstream to surface their own challenges, which is how the two-standard problem revealed itself: Learning & Development needed data visualisation, whilst Communications was narrative driven. Four insights set the constraints — Microsoft 365 was non-negotiable, two reporting standards were required, reporting is nobody’s favourite task, and the room had to be legible to people who had never seen our work.
02
Concept & Architecture
I ideated to emulate room presence, drawing interaction cues from physical Obeyas and UI cues from escape room games. I mapped the information architecture first to establish how to structure the Obeya and how people would move between walls, then reviewed the proposed flow with the team before committing to wireframes. The architecture then became the brief for everything that followed: each wall defined which data had to be captured and from which workstream.
03
Wireframes & Data
I started in low fidelity, wireframing two layouts with opportunity for minor customisation and variables. I also prototyped how people would move between walls before adding any visual detail. In parallel, Anukriti and I built a centralised Excel sheet that feeds CXE workstream data into Power BI, which gave me real data to design against.
04
Two Deliveries
Delivery ran on two tracks. Research had shown Microsoft 365 was where the team already worked and the only route to dynamic data, so the working Obeya was built there — Power BI visuals carried into PowerPoint. Alongside it I built a north star: a more experiential prototype showing where the room could go once automation and permissions caught up.
The solution
A Unity-based navigable prototype, where a team can see their strategy, performance, ad-hoc load and blockers in one place.
Four Walls
The portfolio wall shows strategic objectives, the performance wall shows the metrics per workstream, the ad-hoc wall shows the unplanned work and what it costs in capacity, and the action board shows the live impediments.
Quantitative Templates
Cyclical workstreams (Learning & Development, Document Migration, Quality Assessment, Service Support and Customer Boards) report through bar and pie charts, so status reads at a glance.
Qualitative Templates
Transformation work (Communications, CX Measurement and the IPC journey flows) is qualitative, so it reports case by case through four fixed columns: Targets, Status, Challenges and Call to Action. The structure keeps updates comparable.
Helper UI
A translucent navigation bar, inspired by mixed reality, maintains room presence and also adheres to mobile conventions. Help, Rules and Tips live there so users can serve themselves.
Four Walls
The portfolio wall shows strategic objectives, the performance wall shows the metrics per workstream, the ad-hoc wall shows the unplanned work and what it costs in capacity, and the action board shows the live impediments.
Quantitative Templates
Cyclical workstreams (Learning & Development, Document Migration, Quality Assessment, Service Support and Customer Boards) report through bar and pie charts, so status reads at a glance.
Qualitative Templates
Transformation work (Communications, CX Measurement and the IPC journey flows) is qualitative, so it reports case by case through four fixed columns: Targets, Status, Challenges and Call to Action. The structure keeps updates comparable.
Helper UI
A translucent navigation bar, inspired by mixed reality, maintains room presence and also adheres to mobile conventions. Help, Rules and Tips live there so users can serve themselves.
Reflection & learnings
What I learned
Embedding within each workstream made the difference: the two-template insight was discovered organically and ended up shaping the entire template system. I also learned how much of a design depends on permissions you don’t control: due to various organisation impediments, I had to temporarily update data manually to keep the MVP moving.
Changes I’d make
Looking back, I would have run earlier validation sessions with broader I&E stakeholders. Because they are a key user group, deeper workshopping likely would have led us to reprioritise certain features. Additionally, I would have connected with specialist Microsoft 365 teams earlier to assess the technical feasibility and required permissions for our prototypes. Finally, we learned that a static Obeya room risks becoming a maintenance burden without proper automation.