Case Study — Jobvibe
Enhance user experience for the team engagement mobile app
The Brief
I and my teammate Johnny, being assigned to follow a UX design project in 2.5 weeks time. Our Client JobVibe, is an application that aim to improve customers’ team performance by monitoring team morale and identify issues within the team.
JobVibe currently use weekly model to gather team members’ morale rating on every Friday, and ask them about the “factors” that went well or needed to improve in the last week, and ask them to provide comments then show through “Fix”(issues) and “Buzz”(appreciations) page on the app. All comments, base on users’ choice, will show on the “Fix” and “Buzz” page non-anonymously. Then the other data will be on a dashboard on web application available to all team members, and the aim is manager can use the information on dashboard, see the morale trends and review the “Fix” and “Buzz” comments and reactive to the issues to help improving team performance.
Request from customer
In the brief, we noted that customer want to sell their services to target buyers that have team members number from 100–500 people, refer to that need, they want to develop the application to be more useful for managerial users to see the insights and trends from the information provided, especially on the “Fix”(issues) page. Moreover, after further discussion about their current application performance, we found out the reason behind improving the “Fix” page is that the current application is actually gathering useless information for the team leaders, and the JobVibe team is working on some UI design to make the experience better at the same time.
So, after the customer meeting, we aimed on two objective on this projects: 1. Improve the team members’ comment quality
2. A longer term system that can let managerial users make use of the information provided by team members.
Our Assumptions
We believe that an employee engagement and communication tool is only a platform for team to communication, the motivation for employees to comment in quality way is not only affected by the UI design of the application, but to create an experience for users that it is attractive for users to leave comments on the platform. We need to find the reason why employees will be motivated to comment on issue in their team that help to improve performance — employee engagement.
Our assumption is that employees who are more engaged to their team are more willing to comment on issue that affect team performance, so, if we could find out the initiatives that could increase employee engagement, and apply those insights on the application, at the same time consider the way managerial users could effectively use the information, then we would be able to accomplish both objectives on our design.
Research Approach and Objective
Current application evaluation
- Learn the current application experience, define the problem area that related or unrelated to the problem we want to solve.
Market competitor analysis
- Understanding the differences between JobVibe and other main competitors, define JobVibe’s market positioning.
Current user feedback
- To learn about user type and their true need
Interviews
- Explore about employee engagement and team communication from team leader and team member aspect.
- Research audience — 1 Team Leader, 1 Team member
Insights
- Language
- JobVibe Style
- Employee motivation
We synthesise the research result and got three main insights that can help to improve the application design.
- Language — from application evaluation and current user feedback we found that the language used in the application is not human-centred, for example, the application uses “Fix” and “Buzz” as the conversation categories and even ask user to post “Fix” when they want to give comment to that comment type, feedback from current users said that they are confused with the information they have to put into this comment, so one of our mission in design improvement should be clarifying the ideas to users.
- Style — When comparing JobVibe with other competitor such as 15Five and Tinypulse, we found that in order to keep full transparency in JobVibe, it do not have some attractive way to ask for comments, for example, other application have anonymous feedback system and private message system. Therefore, another insight is to find a way to generating useful information from JobVibe users in the full transparent environment.
- Employee motivation — From current user feed back and interviews, we discovered some indicators of how manager see an employee is shown engaged, e.g. employee fill in non-compulsory survey, and factors that could increase employees’s engagement to the team and motivation to give feedback. e.g. a safe environment to talk, employee want to proof their time are used effectively & people want to know their comment are useful and influencing something to happen.
Creating affinity diagram to consolidate research result, in order to find out the common needs.


Needs prioritised design
Further developing the design, although there are many needs we have to fulfil, but we set our ground on prioritising needs on our design:
- Demonstrate effectiveness for users, so they will know they are influencing the team building.
- An issue-management framework for management and staff.
- Get more meaningful information by providing a safe space
- Keep the app simple and easy to use which match the JobVibe style.
Persona are conducted based on our research as the main user group we would want to fulfil and prioritised design can fulfil some of their core needs and concerns.


Design
Ideation 1
Our team managed to create a new design complying the insights, which have a new impact level system to gather employee’s opinions on each topic that everybody has in the team, and managers can use those total impact level to recognise the most important issue and solve them. In this design, we applied the most simplified way to fulfil all the design need to solve the problems about employee engagement and also the requirement from customer.
After we show the hand-sketch of the idea on the new design, we had been told by client that they do not have the resources to launch a redesign and they would love to keep their original design in the coming future, and then they narrow down the requirement of the project and ask us to work on the “Fix” page flow for managerial use only.

Ideation 2
Even though the requirement had been narrowed down, but we communicate with client that we shall keep the design concept of increase employee engagement and the design needs we had when we design the “Fix” page for him, if not, the whole project will be only a design for managerial users and not getting to the point of collecting useful comments from team members.
So we started to work on iterating the deign of the current app that could fulfil both the business need and the real user needs, and leverage the application’s influence on employee engagement.
Results
We redesigned a new flow for current “Fix” page, and suggested them to use a more clear language, so we used “Issues” to replace the “Fix” page, and the below are the new pages we suggest JobVibe to add based on the design needs we proposed.
Usability testing: 3 people
Prototype: https://invis.io/388KBHLGR
*not 100% clickable prototype
Below are the core design add on JobVibe’s current application (Mobile only):
System map of “Issue” screens:

Relate “Factor” to comment
This suggestion is given to make a change on current Issue page, currently they are using a feed style like Facebook to show all the topics with everything words that people put in it. We suggest them to change the layout with factors related to the topics, and the change start from where users choose to talk about an issues. Therefore, users can see all the issues at a glance and quickly access to the type of the issues.
The Issues page layout evolve (from Pic 5.0 to Pic 5.1), and adding the issue type and use short topic, so users can access the information at a glance.


There are two situations that users can post an issue, first one is after they input the weekly vibe, question will popup (Pic 6.0) to request for details, then input page will comes up (Pic 6.1). About the input page, users will input topic in compulsory, and details are optional, in order to fulfil different level of user engagement on providing information. Also, when they provide details, they need to pick one “Factor” related to the information they give.


Top “Factors” / Top Issues
A new category “Top” is suggested to add to the panel under issues, and two sorting method provided in top “Factors” or top Issues, users can see the highest responded post base on the “factors” chosen by all team members or the issues themselves.
This design support the need of managerial users to know what are the hot issues they could solve it first, at the same letting team members influence the whole progress even they only input their weekly vibe by choosing the “factors”, their selection also reflect on the “Top Factors” sorting.
“Top” post divide into two sorting methods: “Top Factors” (Pic 7.0) & “Top Issues” (Pic 7.1).
In “Top Factors”, people can click into the “Factor” and see all the issues of that “Factor”.
In “Top Issues”, the issues are arranged by the most response rate, and it could be counted by the most agreed, or the most commented.


In Progress Function
A new category “In Progress” is suggested to add into the panel, in current version, every issues responded by Team leader will directly send to “Actioned” page, and new status update will replace the old one, they are no tracking for the issues and status for team members.
The new “In Progress” screen are added to give team members to join in the conversation, track and provide opinions on team leader’s status update.

In Progress page will provide all status update information (Pic 8.1), and put status update into the comments (Pic 8.2) so users can track the message before and after the status update.


Dashboard
It is suggested to put on the current insight page, with two versions of team leaders and team members, the information shown on the screen will be different, and it needs to be decided by research on what kind of information would users matter. The use of dashboard is powerful as it users can look at the trends and team performance here and trigger users to further engage in the app.
Pic 9.0 is an example of team leader and team member in Pic 9.2. information provided is different, base on users’ interest.
Information provided can be fluid, and pressing squares in this screen can forward to the screens related to the information.


Suggestions for future development
Besides the design on the application screens, our team also provide some suggestions on their current app that can improve the experience and further reach business and users goal.
- Design of “Factor” need to improve, to be more people-related, so team member can empathise on the “Factor” they pick, so they could be familiar with them and share more on issues related to them, not only use business or team related topics that team member does not understand.
- Gamification — Can be an evolvement of the dashboard function that motivates team member to engage on the application.
- Appreciation — Solving issues are important, but appreciation is also vital to team members. From the concept of new issues screens layout, similar idea on “Buzz” will be a useful tool.
- Poll — “Factor” has been one of the polling system provided for issues arrangement to get users involve, we foresee that if the application want to be focus on solving team issues and improve performance, so, a poll system for decision making could be useful.

