Connecting people. Building a strong culture across Uber groups.
Whober is a tool that allows employees to share their professional experiences, skills, interests, curiosities, and achievements. It also serves as a valuable resource for showcasing the groups and teams a person has been part of, helping to foster connections and knowledge exchange among colleagues.
Client
Uber
Industry
SaaS, Mobility
Role
Senior Product Designer
Date
2022
Problem
Creating a group on Whober was entirely dependent on the engineering team, with the process taking up to two weeks to complete. Additionally, the action of joining a group wasn’t available within Whober itself, resulting in a fragmented and disconnected experience for users.
Challenge
Help employees connect with colleagues and feel part of a global culture
Centralize and simplify access to onboarding and internal resources
Enable fast, self-service creation of groups without engineering involvement
Solutions
Connect people, teams and groups across Uber
Centralize fragmented onboarding processes
Strengthen company culture through shared knowledge
User research
Method: User Interview + Survey
I invited a group of users to participate in interviews and answer a short survey.
Research Goals
Understand the users needs and pain points
Evaluate usability and information flow
Validate feature relevance and expectations
Key findings
Insights gathered from 20 user interviews and testing sessions.
Group types
78%
of users couldn't distinguish between different group types
"It’s pretty confusing to understand the different types of groups."
Group creation
92%
said the process was slow, manual, and lacked visibility
"It would be really nice if I could easily update my profile or join communities without relying on others to set it up."
Group filtering
71%
struggled to discover groups due to missing filters.
"The idea behind Whober is great, but the current design doesn’t excite me. It feels a bit outdated and difficult to navigate."
Joining groups
67%
said joining groups was fragmented, happening outside Whober.
" It’s confusing to navigate through different types of groups, and joining one feels disconnected"
Uber
I started by exploring the M&A team’s roles, the data they handle, and the flow of a typical deal—tracking key questions in a FigJam wall.
To deepen insights, I ran a discovery session with the M&A team, involving them early to ensure our technical solutions matched real user needs.
Low-fi prototypes
After drawing some initial ideas, the concept started to mature, and I moved this into low/medium fidelity prototypes so that I could facilitate deeper technical discussions, as well as user testing.
User testing
For this phase of the project, I chose to carry out unmoderated tests, It was possible to identify 85% of the usability issues and also get a clear view of what was working and what was not, over each iteration cycle.
Interestingly, the most engaged areas were where users expected to access groups.
User Story Mapping
I also created a user story map to visualize the entire process from the user's point of view focusing on the key steps and actions needed to reach our main goal for the MVP. This helped align the team around what really mattered, creating a shared understanding of where to focus our efforts.
UI Design
With clear goals and insights in hand, I translated ideas into high-fidelity interfaces. The focus was on creating a clean, intuitive, and consistent experience aligned with the company’s design system — while making it easier for users to navigate, connect, and take action.
New layout organizes content in a centralized manner. The badges section now features employees' main achievements without relying on engineering.
In the dedicated groups section, a “Create Group” button is immediately visible and ready to be explored. Additionally, all groups that the user manages are visible, as well as a quick filter to help with quick searching.
On the group page, a tag shows what type of group it is, its visibility, contacts, members, features, and how many groups are linked to it.
The tag type "Whober group" is located just below the group name, as well as information about the number of members.
A session dedicated to informing about all the group's visibility
In the groups section, quick filters help you find groups by type
When inserting a profile image for the badge type group, the inserted image is automatically displayed in the personal profile.
Results
95% reduction in group creation time
With the new self-serve flow, users can create and manage groups in under 1 minute — a 95% reduction in time. That’s more time back for engineering to focus on high-impact work.
100% increase in user autonomy
By moving the entire group creation and joining flow into Whober, users now have full control, creating a smoother and more connected experience.
Streamlined onboarding
New employees can now find and join relevant groups directly within the platform, helping them integrate into the company culture from day one — solving the disconnect.
Improved consistency
The redesigned UI aligned with the official design system, reinforcing trust and usability across the platform, which was previously outdated and hard to navigate.
