Case study

Creating a personal and focused collaborative feedback platform that supports ongoing employee development

Overview

Back in early 2020 Peakon product leadership set out to build a new product team that will expand their product offering and discover and develop a tool within performance management market.

Initial research told us the story that traditional performance management processes are broken and are not delivering the employee motivation, focus and ultimately high performance it promises.

As a result hereof, the majority of companies are either in the midst of or are planning to adjust or even totally revamp their performance management processes shifting from a traditional backward focussed yearly assessment to a more forward-oriented development focussed and continuous process.

We set ourselves to discover, test, develop, research and learn again how to build the most effective solution for the future of performance management that we called "Grow".

After a year of development with Alpha, Beta and Early access releases, we learned that we needed to make the core Grow journey more seamless and connected with a dashboard as the centrepiece that is personal and focused, easy to use and fun, guides the users towards improvements and keeps in mind the three primary user personas, their respective journeys and future feature development.

Disclaimer: This case study outlines the process and discovery for “Grow dashboard v2” and showcases the rest of the Grow platform and the core user journey that I have also been part of discovering and designing.

My contribution

Product discovery
User research 
Product design 

The team

1x Product Manager
1x Product Designer
1x Engineering Manager
2x Back-end Developers
2x Front-end Developers
1x Quality Assurance Engineer

Year

2020 - Ongoing

Problem Statement

From user feedback that we gathered earlier, we found out that Grow recipients want more guidance through different stages of their Grow journey and the ability to see a clear and understandable overview of the most important things they have to do at each stage. Still, most importantly, they want to get an easy overview of their core insights to reflect and prioritise their development needs.

Job to be done

"As a recipient when I receive feedback in the Grow dashboard I want to easily get an overview of the core insights Grow can deliver, so I can reflect and prioritise my development needs."

Keep in mind the different stages of the Grow journey and how the recipient receives feedback.

Goals and objectives

💪 Main goals

• Create an improved information architecture that:
  • Aligns with the user's preferred user journey.
  • Enables the user to easily access the features/insights most important to them, without having to go digging for it.
  • Enables scaling the dashboard with more features without making views overly complex.
    
    
• Build the Grow development journey/steps/components into the dashboard so that users understand what they are, what happens next, what options they have and what they should do next.

🕵️‍♀️ Research goal

• Explore and validate Grow users’ JTBD when receiving feedback 

• Explore how well the Grow dashboard currently supports users' JTBD and what are the gaps

• Understand how our ideas meet the JTBD

📈 Strategic goal

• Improve user’s professional development journey by designing an engaging and motivating dashboard experience.

Process and scope

Taking in consideration the larger problem we decide to run this project for 6 months and divide it into three phases: Understand and prepare, User interviews and analysis, Define, design and deliver.

Phase 1: Understand and prepare

First and foremost, I started to prepare the project by setting up a design brief and involving all the relevant stakeholders to understand and define the problem statement, why are we doing this project and what is the background, define the scope and design process, align on the goals and clear the unknowns.

User journey analysis

To understand how the current Grow user journey looks like, I created a user journey map that was used to align stakeholders and the delivery team around how does the current feature hold together across the different Grow user personas. From the feedback and inputs gathered during the prior research, I mapped out the pains and gains on different touchpoints.

Personas

When talking about user personas in Grow, we talk about the employees with a role or mental state in the tool. This employee can also have all the roles at the same time.

• Recipient - An employee who receives Grow feedback.
• Feedback contributor - An employee who provides Grow feedback to one or more Recipients.
• Mentor - An employee that has been added by the Recipient or the system to review Recipients’ received feedback.

First design workshop

When the User journey map was finished, and we have aligned on the projects process. I created and facilitated a first kick-off meeting/design workshop with the rest of the cross-functional product team to help key stakeholders develop a shared understanding of the problem, goals and priorities, gain awareness of possible blockers and ways to progress and generate ideas that to the problem that can be shown to users during user interviews.

Phase 2: User interviews and analysis

After the first design workshop, we set up user interviews to understand user needs and pains using the current Grow dashboard, focusing on their JTBD when receiving feedback, plus test early concepts and ideas.

The user interviews were divided into three parts:

1. Explore and validate Grow users’ JTBD when receiving feedback.
2. How does the Grow dashboard currently supports their JTBD and what are the gaps.
3. Understand how our two design prototypes meet the JTBD.

I collaborated with a UX researcher to plan the user interviews by setting up test script, recruit, conduct and also analyse the interviews.

🏆 Insights

• There are lots of interesting data points on the dashboard, but users find that they need support to clearly see what to focus on.
• Users look for 1. new feedback since last round 2. the lowest score 3. the comments to contextualise – the dashboard doesn't enable that journey enough.
• Users like to, but don't have, enough points of interaction in Grow, can't take notes, can't "improve".
• Users set priorities not only based on lowest score, but based on what they want to learn more about.
• Users need an overview of all behaviours to distinguish which ones to work on, but as shown now, they can't filter and compare them to match what they wish to learn about.
• Comments are still where the real value lies to truly understand ones feedback, but scores have become an important tool to set priorities.

Phase 3: Define, design and deliver

After the user interviews and analysis, it was time to get the team and other stakeholders into one “zoom” meeting, present the findings and align on what is that we were going to focus on based on them and what are the most significant opportunities we want to solve.

We agreed that these are the most critical “HMW” we want this solution to solve:

“🤔 How might we enable the user to easily get an overview of the core insights Grow can deliver to distinguish which ones to work on?”

“🤔 How might we give the user a better understanding of meaningful changes in their feedback?”

“🤔 How might we guide the user through different stages of their “Grow journey” and provide them with a clear and comprehensible overview of the most important things to do at each stage?”

Based on these “HMW”, I facilitated another design workshop where I asked the team to generate ideas based on the findings from the user interviews and the previous research. At the end of the session, we voted for our favourite ideas and discussed feasibility at a high level if needed and voted or prioritise them.

Feedback and the solution

During the design process, I hosted several feedback sessions with the team, stakeholders and members of the design department to have the most aligned solution and remove any roadblocks and have a smoother transition for the delivery.

We created an improved information architecture that aligns with the user’s Grow development journey. It enables them to access insights easily and features most important to them and allows them to understand what options they have and what they should do next.

Onboarding stage

Within the onboarding, stage recipients spend setting up their Grow profile and get introduced to core concepts of Grow. When users complete their onboarding, they have their first touchpoint with the new dashboard and improved information architecture. Within the Growth overview, they are introduced with the new “To do” component that will nudge and guide users throughout their journey in Grow—always driving attention to what’s essential.

The self-assessment (and wait for data) stage

Before there is any feedback incoming, the user enters a period where there is little to no data to look at besides their self-assessment and anytime feedback they have received. Users can give continuous feedback to anyone that has requested it from them meanwhile. The user interface is designed together with a copy to guide the user and be as helpful as possible as giving feedback can be a daunting experience, so we use empty states and onboarding modals at the right moments only.

The "see your (first) scores and prioritise" stage

The dashboard and, therefore, information on it adjust to the user's journey and which stage they are currently at. Once they start receiving their first scores and feedback, they see what’s new, the next steps in their development journey, their strengths and development needs, and their current development focus.

This stage is followed up with the “Get in-depth feedback and Learn, plan & improve” step, where users can start tracking their prioritised behaviours since you set them as a priority and ask in-depth questions to their colleagues.

Learnings and next steps

As for learnings, I think it’s crucial to understand the user; I think we should have had another round of interviews to purely test the concepts to realise beforehand if it is performing how we expected it to do.

This new, improved experience is now released to all the early access customers that will be part of a user research study to figure out how sticky the product is and does this experience improves the retention, besides understanding more about user pains and needs when giving and receiving performance feedback.

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