Lenia Margariti, PhD

IdeaNet Ideation Platform

Deploying an Internal Innovation & Ideation Platform
2018-2019

Duration: 9 months

Role: Digital Transformation Analyst / Service Design (COSMOTE / DT)

Team: IT D&I - Software Engineers, Marketing

Methods: Agile, Service Design, UI customization, User Experience Evaluation, Usability Testing

Impact: Redesigned COSMOTE’s internal innovation platform to improve usability, engagement, and idea collaboration, aligning product UX with organisational structure and innovation strategy.

Overview

IdeaNet is COSMOTE’s internal innovation platform designed to support employee ideation, collaboration, and entrepreneurship through digital tools and engagement programmes such as hackathons, workshops, and training initiatives.

Built on the Hype Innovation platform, it enables employees to create and share ideas, collaborate through comments and voting, follow ideas and contributors, and engage with innovation activities across the organisation.

My role focused on shaping the platform’s user experience, visual identity, and engagement model to better align with internal innovation goals and service design principles.



Above: UI Customization: Improving Visual Hierarchy.

Challenge

The platform needed to balance social media–like interaction patterns with structured innovation workflows, while ensuring:

  • High engagement and sustained participation across employees
  • Clear and intuitive navigation of ideas and contributions
  • Strong alignment with internal brand and service design principles
  • Support for both informal collaboration and structured innovation processes

Hype platform provided many of these elements already, however, there was need to customize journeys and UI elements to fit to COSMOTE’s organisational structure and innovation / business goals.

My Role

I contributed as a UX/UI Designer and service designer, working across design, deployment and implementation.

Key responsibilities included:

  • Defining and customizing the platform’s visual identity (colour, typography, logo direction) aligned with brand guidelines while maintaining a playfull approach.
  • Improving UI structure, hierarchy, and readability across key screens (HTML/CSS)
  • Designing and re-fining core user journeys (idea creation, browsing, interaction flows)
  • Developing custom interface components through the platform(login flows, help sections, notifications, and pop-ups)
  • Supporting stakeholder communication with product, marketing, and innovation teams
  • Facilitating internal feedback loops through prototyping and user testing



Above: Example journey through the platform, mapping touchpoints, actions and emotions.

Approach

I redesigned key interaction patterns to improve usability and engagement across the platform.

This included:

  • Simplifying navigation and improving visual hierarchy to make ideas easier to discover and evaluate
  • Enhancing interaction feedback (notifications, confirmations, guidance elements) to increase user confidence and control
  • Introducing lightweight gamification and motion design patterns to improve engagement and participation (SVGs/GIFs)
  • Iteratively testing prototypes with internal users to identify friction points in core workflows

In parallel, I supported internal innovation activities such as workshops and mentoring sessions to increase platform adoption and improve digital literacy around UX/UI and ideation tools.





Above: UI Customization: SVGs for gamification.

Outcome

The work improved the clarity, usability, and engagement of the IdeaNet platform, supporting wider participation in COSMOTE’s internal innovation ecosystem.

It strengthened the connection between design, engagement strategy, and organisational innovation initiatives by making idea sharing more accessible, structured, and interactive for employees.



Above: Example User flow through the platform: Uploading an Idea.