Enhanced guidance for improved support

The ask was more guidance. The fix was a different pattern entirely.

Role

Product Designer

Team

Product Manager, HRBP, Technical Managers

Duration

5 weeks

Tools

Figma, HTML, CSS, WalkMe

TL;DR

The PM asked for more guidance pathways and tooltips to cut time-to-completion. My hypothesis was the opposite: the failure was structural — managers were already ignoring the guidance in place, and adding more wouldn't change that.

I brought skeptical stakeholders into the usability evidence rather than argue the point, and it pointed to a pattern problem, not a content one. The result was a contextual drawer system built to match the complexity of the work.

Impact

15%guidance usage, up from under 5%

+4pteSAT, crossing the 80% industry benchmark

<5%legacy guidance engagement (the baseline this replaced)

The ask vs. the reframe

More tooltips was a reasonable read: time-to-completion was high, so the assumed fix was to add more help along the way. I wasn't convinced adding more of an existing pattern could move a number that high — my hunch was the pattern itself, not what it said.

A structural hypothesis, not a content one

The tooltip was the wrong container — ephemeral hints can't carry someone through a multi-stage evaluation. More of them would only fail louder.

Letting the evidence align the room

The hypothesis met resistance, so instead of arguing it, I brought the usage data: one-time tours had an 85% drop-off, and just 5% of users touched a tooltip during an evaluation. That was enough to get stakeholders into usability sessions.

What I found

Swivel chair enablement

To evaluate with any confidence, managers left the tool entirely — shuttling between a knowledge base, personal notes, and training just to interpret a rating.

What the room saw

The usability sessions confirmed it firsthand: managers lost their place mid-evaluation, dismissed modal guidance on sight, and never glanced at a tooltip.

Design

With the room aligned on a pattern problem, the design work was to build the right container — and to match its structure to how complex each evaluation stage actually was.

Matching the pattern to the content

A modal interrupts. A redesigned tooltip is still ephemeral. The drawer was the only persistent pattern that could sit alongside the evaluation form without displacing the task: available when needed, out of the way when not.

Content complexity varied across evaluation stages, so I designed a spectrum of variants, each matched to the structure the content actually required.

Drawer header