Unionen.se
UX/UI/DesignOPS
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Unionen are Swedens largest trade union, organizing over 600 000 members and 27 000 elected union representatives throughout the private sector. Since 2018, Unionen has put a lot of work into modernizing and digitalizing their services for both members and elected representatives and make them available on the web without the need to call or send in any paper forms. The last four years, I’ve been working with Unionen to help them on their digitalization journey.
Responsibilities at Unionen
At Unionen I worked together with internal stakeholders, service designers and developers to create a wide range of tools and services for both union members as well as elected representatives. In many projects I was involved throughout the whole process, from conducting interviews and doing user research to identify user and organizational needs, writing requirements, building and testing prototypes on real users, creating pixel perfect design as well as supporting the developers during the development process.
In addition, I created and maintained the design system Unionen UI and consulted on questions on the more technical spectrum of design, for example site image optimizations and the frontend framework.
Design system
Unionens Design System Unionen UI let’s designers easily create both prototypes and pixel perfect designs with minimal effort. The design system is made in Figma and contain all colors, text tyles, shadows, icons and components used on the site. To help both new and old designers create great, consistent looking design, most things are well documented with subject ranging from how to create a Unionen style icons to the guides to what modal variant should be used for what type of content. To make communication between designers and developers easier, names and SAAS variables from the codebase are listed in Unionen UI as well.
Smart components
All components are made with auto layout and variables making them responsive and ready to be used in both prototypes as well as final design handovers.
Icon library
The icon library contains over 200 icons created for unionen.se Each icon has a 16x16px and a 24x24px variant with different levels of detail depending on where they are used.
Features for members
Members as Unionen differs a lot one another. They all are white collar workers in the private sector but come from over 88 000 different workplaces all over Sweden, all with different positions, educational background and level of pay.
Most members are not involved in union work on a regular basis and only visits Unionen.se when they need help with something. That means everything aimed towards members need to be simple and easy to use as most are gonna be first time or casual users. Unionen’s main focus is to help their members to help themselves. For example, they offer a huge library of articles on work law, a Salary Coach and a Collective Agreement Reader just to mention as few. Unionen also performs yearly drives to made their members submit data about their income and workplace to be able to offer detailed statistics back to it’s members
Tools for elected representatives
There are thousands of elected representatives at Unionen, ranging from those who work full time to others that only spend a few hours a year in their role as elected representative.
A big challenge is to create powerful tools that our power users need to manage their role while still making it easy for those who might only log in aq few times each year to update their union club’s contact information or to send in the yearly meeting documentation.
Case Study:
Annual meeting tool
For most Unionen clubs, the biggest event of the year is the annual meeting where the club presents the work they’ve done during the previous year and elects who is going to represent the club moving forward. There’s a lot of work to be done by the the board both ahead and after the meeting and can be very stressful.
To help Unionens representatives, the Annual meeting tool was created that guides them through the whole process – from planning the meeting to signing the protocol.
The tool is a living entity that through yearly user interviews, data collection and study visits has grown from a MVP used by a few to an fully featured digital wizard used by most clubs.
Before the meeting
The elected representatives start by filling in when they’re planning on holding the meeting and get a suggestion for a meeting agenda they modify directly in the tool. The data is used to generate templates that can be sent all members in the club with a single click though the built in e-mail or news functions. If the elected representatives prefer to e-mail the invitation themselves, both a quick-copy template and an .ics calendar invite generator is available.
The tool also supplies the elected representatives with templates for all documents that the need to be prepare together with guides for how to organize the work in the club and how to engage the club members.
During the meeting
The elected representatives can use the interactive version of the agenda they created before the meeting to guide them through the each item on it. Just like in the rest of the tool, all information is saved automatically ensuring no data is lost if something would happen.
After the meeting
When the meeting is over the elected representatives can register who got elected in the assignment registration wizard.
Based on the interactive agenda and registrated assignments, a meeting protocol is generated. The person who was elected meeting secretary can then freely edit the protocol if they want to adjust anything before signing through BankID and handing it off to the adjuster who makes sure everything is correct before also digitally signing the protocol.
When all is done, the only thing left is for the elected representatives to upload any additional documentation and send it in to Unionen.
Client value
In addition helping the elected representatives, Unionen has also benefited a lot on the annual meeting tool. Before when the 2 500 clubs sent in their yearly meeting protocols and documentation it was of varying quality and completeness. This resulted in a lot of work for Unionen’s employees when they had to reach out to request additional information.
With almost three fourths of all clubs using the annual meeting tool, the number of protocols with missing information has been reduced greatly resulting in less administration work for Unionen’s employees.