Grow: A Web Dashboard

tracking employee progression at a glance

ROLE

UX Researcher
UX Designer

TOOLS

Sketch
InVision

OUR MISSION

Our client, Grow, is a Slack app that helps its users give and receive feedback within their organization so that they can facilitate personal growth and self-awareness within the flow of work.

Ryan and Richard, the co-founders of Grow, asked us to create an admin dashboard as an initial minimum viable product (MVP) that can meet the needs of their current audience: Managers from Small to Mid-sized Businesses (SMBs). Managers from SMBs are targets who would incorporate Grow into their organization. Grow’s ultimate goal was to increase profit immediately.

DIVING INTO RESEARCH

We conducted industry/competitor research and interviews with three Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and six managers who use Grow to learn the following:

What are the needs of current users and potential users of Grow?
How would potential users engage with Slack and what are the motivations behind their current Slack in-app usage?
How can Grow stand out from competitors within the industry?

DIVING INTO RESEARCH

WHAT USERS WANTED

From the interviews, we had some key findings that could be good opportunities for Grow.

Managers want to track 1:1 feedback over time.

They want to help their team members formulate their goals and set benchmarks in a team with the feedback data. The currently scattered and disorganized feedback data frustrates managers when performing formal annual evaluations.

Grow’s opportunity is in companies where they understand how to establish a culture of feedback.

Companies that value feedback and wish to develop individuals in their careers can build a culture of feedback. By setting routine reminders to give and receive feedback, a busy manager can ingrain that behavior. These behaviors create habits and further the company culture.

Learning and Development (L&D) is crucial to employees but also to companies.

Employees want feedback related to career-growth and not just for their current jobs. Employees look for companies where they can learn and develop, and when employers can meet this need, employee retention problems can be solved.

DIVING INTO RESEARCH

GROW'S COMPETITORS

Domain research and competitor analysis helped us to understand Grow’s business model and how we can help managers differently from competitors. Grow’s competitors can be categorized into three types: Evaluative, Coaching, and Appreciative.

Evaluative feedback: Personal and professional growth, but with a focus on formal feedback tied to achievement of business goals.
‍Coaching feedback: Personal and professional growth with a focus on informal feedback.
‍Appreciative feedback: Praise, recognition and celebration, while minimizing negative feedback.

And Grow’s opportunity among these competitors existed here: As a cheaper platform for personal and professional growth focusing on informal feedback to retain millennial professionals.

THE PROBLEM

While integrating the research results, we identified a problem. This problem guided us for the rest of the design process.

Busy SMB Managers need a digital tool to organize informal feedback in order to better track employee progress over time.

EXPLORING CONCEPTS

We brainstormed and sketched our ideas. Then we merged our ideations into three concepts that represent three different ways that could solve the problem we defined. Each concept focused on different features, including the same content that was addressed on user interviews: tracking feedback data, behavioral nudging, and identifying skill mentors.

Concept 1:
THE SPREADSHEET UI

Concept 2:
THE POST-IT

Concept 3:
THE RECIPE CARD

Managers get a team pulse by tracking and aggregating data over time and collecting transactional records of feedback

Managers can see a minimalistic view of employees' feedback with the ability to dig deeper into the details.

An overall hierarchy from big to small with visuals that allow users to dig deeper into the dashboard if needed.

EXPLORING CONCEPTS

CONCEPT TESTING

Users preferred Concept 3. There were three reasons for it.

Dashboard look gave them familiarity.

High-level synthesis to individual feedback notes showed users a clear hierarchy.

It saved time by not having to click through if the team is doing well.

In addition to the fact that users liked concept 3, we also heard other interesting insights from users. These insights helped us to design the next steps.

Users wanted the combination of quantitative and qualitative data, which gives insights into team dynamics.

"As a manager, I want some sort of evaluation of the feedback being given… and how frequent is each feedback being given. And I think that's a way to pick up on team dynamics."

- COO at a startup

Users liked to see all the information at a glance. They did not want to click several times or go beyond one page for unnecessary info.

"Beyond just, here's the data, it's giving you some high-level insights, to where in the best case scenario, maybe you don't have to go much beyond 1 page."

- Product Manager at a large company

Managers wanted to get insights from the quality and content of feedback that employees exchange, which led to the privacy issue.

"As a manager, what I would do is I skim a list of feedback and look for similar words. And look for themes and patterns."

- Program Manager at Squarespace

EXPLORING CONCEPTS

Alignment with the Client

Based on what we heard from the users, we built a sitemap to get a holistic insight on the contents that should be in the dashboard and how we would structure them. The assumption behind this was that Grow collects feedback over time and analyzes the patterns in the feedback data.

When we brought it up to the client, we realized that we were not quite in alignment on the issue of privacy on Grow. Managers that we interviewed said that they needed to see the feedback content to gain a narrative and put meaning behind the metrics that Grow was collecting, which was mostly quantity based.

However, the client prioritized employee privacy because of Grow’s company ethics and more importantly, they did not want users to misuse feedback data for performance evaluation.

DESIGNING SOLUTIONS

As a result, we iterated our designs to address only the metrics Grow currently provides to the managers:

Skills progression based on the emoji impression users received
Who gave feedback and who received feedback
Individual engagement based on the number of total feedback
Team mentors in terms of the number of feedback requested

Based on these metrics, we converged our ideas into two main screens :

Team Board Page: Gathering quick high-level engagement and skill progression insights
Individual Team Member Page: Digging deeper into engagement and skill progression for each individual

Hearing the users, we also left an idea of securing feedback contents upon employees’ claim.
※ Feedback Records with Private / Flagged as inappropriate mark

DESIGNING SOLUTIONS

WHAT USERS SAID

We tested the MVP prototype with the users: the managers. They were satisfied with the idea of getting high-level insights on individual employees’ growths and interactions within a team.

But they had doubts on some concepts:

Team aggregation is difficult to be aggregated in a meaningful way. Over-achiever and under-achiever cannot be grouped into an average team.

It’s difficult to determine the quality of the feedback. One piece of feedback from person A might be worth three from person B.

The current emoji impressions are too subjective to set as a tracking and quantifying factor.

Tracking skills progression short-term is not useful. It takes longer to change habits and improve on some skills.

DESIGNING SOLUTIONS

RECOMMENDATIONS

Based on the usability testing results, we left Ryan and Richard with the future recommendations as follows:

Make the dashboard for an individual employee and not for aggregated teams. Test this on both managers and non-managers.
Consider giving managers access to the contents of the feedback for better assessments on the quality of the feedback.
Provide robust onboarding not only for getting used to Slack and the Dashboard but also for teaching how good feedback should look like.
Customizable data collected on individual employees would yield greater accuracy.

LESSONS LEARNED

1. Ask clients for clarity. Don’t keep it to yourself until it becomes a problem.

We had a misalignment with the client about the privacy issue. We were not sure if our client would prioritize employee privacy over the managers’ wants until the client addressed the issue in front of us. It was a huge mistake that forced us to eliminate some of our main ideas.

2. UX design process consists of not only teamwork but also a lot of individual work.

Sometimes we tend to stick to one idea because we keep talking about the same ideas and cannot get away from it. It’s like falling into a rabbit hole. That is when we need to separate and come up with fresh ideas on our own. Then everyone can come back with different ideas on the same subject.