‹ prev project | next project ›
A Code of Business Ethics informs employees on how to conduct themselves with honesty, integrity and within the law. As required reading for all 460K+ employees, Accenture’s Code of Business Ethics was outdated and static and in need of transformation.
We were tasked with defining a UX for Accenture’s Code of Business Ethics that employees would actively want to engage with rather than something they were required to read. Our solution needed to be highly marketable to help promote Accenture’s culture of ethics to the world.
My Role: Team Design Lead
Key Activities: Research, UX design, branding.
Using a Design Thinking approach, we designed a responsive, user-friendly website embedded with a genial chatbot named COBE. The bot serves as a guide for Accenture employees when accessing the rules of ethics conduct, especially when legal questions arise.
The new COBE website, chatbot and marketing campaign resulted in a 20-fold increase in daily visits to the site. The chatbot had over 17k sessions in the first 4 weeks.
Accenture employees from around the world were surveyed and interviewed to learn what people expect from the Code of Business Ethics, how they need to use it and how they need to access it.
We found that Accenture employees want their Code to be interactive, anonymous and act as a guide.
The ability to report ethics concerns anonymously is especially important to people in countries where workplace retaliation is common.
“It’s important to encourage all at every level to speak up and make sure they feel comfortable to raise concerns at any time.”
Mapping out engagement moments.
Mapping a user journey.
Our user-centered UX strategy was led by 6 design principles based on research themes of education, engagement and trust.
Ideation led to consensus that a chatbot, embedded into a responsive website, would be an effective tool for users to quickly engage with the Code and receive a more personal experience.
We designed the bot to guide users through teachable moments with simple, intuitive, conversational interactions. When a user asks the bot a question, the bot encourages them to read relevant sections of the Code. If the user’s question is broad or unclear the bot will provide a menu of contextual choices with which the user can respond. For some topics, the bot will be clear about how the user can reach out to a person.
We divided to conquer and began tackling various aspects of the work simultaneously. We added a content strategist and began focusing on content design, interaction design and visual design while communicating daily with an offshore, MS Bot Framework development team.
Storyboard showing MS Teams collaboration concept.
Wireframes of various states of the bot and website integration.
Branding work included brand definition brainstorm sessions and research of bot design trends for inspiration.
We had a lot of fun designing the bot’s personality and chose the COBE acronym for the name to reinforce it’s purpose.
Whiteboarding COBE attributes.
Bot design trends researched for inspiration.
As we moved to established a voice and tone that was trustworthy, friendly and positive, we began working on visual design treatments that imbued those same characteristics.
Working with our stakeholders from Accenture, we explored various options for color, typography, iconography and the COBE avatar.
Stakeholder presentation of early visual design treatments.
Mobile design of site with bot chat window open.
Code of Business Ethics website homepage.
Code of Business Ethics website internal page.
Accenture portal with bot training module.
We provided a design style guide for developers and future phase designers as well as an editorial style guide which defines how bot content is structured and maintained.
The design style guide includes styles for the COBE identity and avatar and site design, including the grid system, typography, fonts, color, photography, iconography, chatbot elements, etc.
The editorial style guide includes the chatbot function, parts of a chat and the steps for writing a response.
Pages from the COBE design style guide.
Part of the editorial style guide showing how a bot response is structured.
The COBE chatbot is the global face for Accenture’s Code of Business Ethics and is part of their current “Integrity in Action” ethics promotion campaign.
The COBE website and embedded chatbot experience are utilized by Accenture in recruiting efforts and in ethics training for all 450k+ Accenture employees.
the COBE chatbot has been written up by the Wall Street Journal and promoted by Accenture in lead-up to their participation at the WEF in Davos, Switzerland in 2018.
