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A workload alignment solution
Background
Employees want to do their best work, but unclear scope of work at an organizational level often leads to stress and burnout.
Consilio helps employees and managers align expectations, protect focus time, and sustain work quality through shared transparency.
Problem Space
Early-career professionals lack the confidence and practical tools needed to set appropriate workplace limits, resulting in excessive stress, poor work-life balance, and inadequate long-term mental health management strategies. Early literature review and primary research found that while the most powerful drivers of burnout are cultural and organizational imbalances, supportive workplace systems can turn stress into innovation. This is particularly true for early-career workers, who often feel disempowered at work.
How might we help professionals prone to overcommitment focus on high-value work in order to protect well-being and sustain productivity?
Role: UX Researcher & Product Designer (Prototype Lead)Scope: 4-week sprint, student projectTeam: Hillary McLean (Wires), Erik Opoku (Visuals), Dipani Neb (Voice)
Persona
Our target user is represented by Sam, 24, an ambitious hybrid worker in an urban area.
She wants respect and recognition while maintaining work-life balance, but often finds herself overwhelmed with out-of-scope work and too afraid to speak up about it. She values helpfulness over boundaries, so she avoids confrontation and overworks while producing rushed, suboptimal deliveries to meet deadlines.
Design Objectives
Help users identify when a task is out of their scope
Relieve stress related to setting boundaries with organizational support
Increase work quality and productivity within relevant deliveries
Design Requirements
AI checks to decrease friction
Manager/report integration
Design that builds trust across the organization
Ideation & Concept
We envisioned Consilio, a team-integrated app where scope and capacity are shared and supported. It connects employees, managers, and AI guidance to taskload risks early, exploring these core ideas:
Transparent task visibility for managers.
AI-assisted “Scope Checks.”
Shared responsibility between report and manager.
Opportunities for employees to opt into out-of-scope tasks for growth
After two rounds of testing and improvements, we landed on a dashboard-based solution with AI assistance for identifying overload.
Results & Future Considerations
User testing showed that Consilio improved clarity around workload expectations and made task ownership feel clearer and boundary-setting feel more supported. These outcomes showed that thoughtfully designed tools can empower users from all management levels to improve work quality.
Though development ends here, several opportunities emerged during design:
More user flows: employees, managers & stakeholders
More core features: goals, alignment, projects, tasks, inbox, and hours budgeting.
Leadership dashboards to track team capacity, successes, and other metrics
Inclusive design: adding a dark mode/other colour themes
Integration with tools like Slack, Teams, and Asana
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