Whole Foods Market

A workshop with the people writing the policy.

To gain a contextual understanding of the existing workflows and the suite of enterprise tools used in legal document authoring and publishing, I conducted an insight-gathering workshop with the Whole Foods Policy and Compliance Team.

The session established how corporate policy was written, approved and distributed across the company.

20 interviews with the people reading the policy.

More than 20,000 Whole Foods Team Members search and visit corporate policies every week. I conducted one-on-one user interviews with a sample of 20 Team Members to gain insight into how they access, view and acknowledge policy documentation.

A PDF behind a long list of links.

The Whole Foods General Information Guide (GIG) is the company-wide employee policy document. For the authoring team, the GIG is referred to as a policy set, which is broken down into a granular set of individual policies.

The PDF version of the GIG was accessible from the Whole Foods intranet, Innerview. Individual policies were represented by a lengthy list of selectable links, with no ability to search or sort.

The current state of authoring and viewing.

To map the current policy authoring and publishing workflows, I collaborated with developers, project managers and end users to visualize the existing systems and identify inefficiencies.

User insights from the mapping sessions highlighted how critical the authoring and viewing workflows were within each role.

Eight themes, split between authoring and viewing.

User pain points were grouped thematically by contextual similarity and separated between the policy authoring and policy viewing experiences. Each experience distilled into four themes.

Built for the people writing the policy.

An analysis of the authoring pain points emphasized four features centered on policy document authoring, management and acknowledgement tracking.

Built for every Team Member use case.

An analysis of the viewing pain points emphasized three features centered on policy access, viewing and acknowledgement submissions.

The future state, settled before any screen was designed.

I facilitated in-person whiteboarding workshops with the Whole Foods legal team and a sample of Team Members to develop proposed future-state user flows for both the authoring and the viewing experiences.

Policy sets, categories and the relationships between them were defined on the wall, which fixed the structure of the platform ahead of any screen. The output of each session was a wall of open questions grouped by theme.

One fidelity step at a time.

I explored solutions through rapid prototyping. The work climbed one fidelity step at a time: marker sketches, rough wireframes, a clickable prototype and a build-ready specification. Each pass answered a narrower question than the one before it.

The screens changed after every session.

Early sketches and low fidelity wireframes defined the structure of the future Smart GIG platform. I conducted weekly review sessions in person with end users, project managers and developers. Low fidelity wireframes were walked screen by screen, and the feedback from each session was drawn before the next one.

Early feedback from policy authors set the shape of four screens: the policy library, the manage policies table, the create policy form and the dual-pane editor. Running the reviews with developers in the room kept every decision inside what the platform could support.

High fidelity, built from existing components.

After validating the draft wireframes, I integrated components from the Whole Foods enterprise design system into high fidelity mobile and desktop mockups.

Design system components streamlined the design and build process and kept the mobile and desktop mockups consistent with brand standards.

Team Members asked for policies at a glance.

Iterative user feedback guided the placement of UI elements in the viewing experience mockups. Insights from regular usability sessions informed the content hierarchy and the touchpoints.

I initially proposed an expander-based homepage, where a Team Member selects a policy set expander to view its nested policies. User feedback showed a preference for an at-a-glance policy viewing experience without expanding a policy set first, and the homepage was redesigned around it.

Tested against the job, then handed to build.

High fidelity prototypes were tested with Team Members and the legal team before development began. Visual design ran through to launch on the internal platform, shipping seven features across the authoring and viewing experiences.

The specification went to development as a walked flow, with every state and every transition between them drawn in place.

Individual policies, nested inside policy sets.

The policy and policy set editor consolidates policy management. Authors create individual policy documents and nest them within larger policy sets.

Authors manage content, target specific regions, control document versions and navigate between policies from the same editor.

The published page, shown while it is written.

The live preview editor displays real-time policy updates alongside the editing interface. Authors visualize policy edits as they make them, which reduces editing errors.

One repository, with version control.

Policies are organized within a centralized repository. Authors manage, update and track individual policy versions and group them into structured folders.

Policy authors always edit the latest policy document and Team Members always access the latest approved version, which aids compliance and reduces legal risk across Whole Foods Market.

A searchable, role-specific table of contents.

The General Information Guide homepage is the interface for accessing essential policies and information.

The GIG was designed for scannability. It features a device-responsive, searchable, role-specific table of contents, so Team Members find the most relevant, up-to-date content.