Case study: a dashboard for HR people who want to know more about their employees’ happiness

The 2 last weeks of my UX/UI bootcamp at Ironhack were dedicated to the final project. For this project, we had a real brief from a real company.
I’m glad to say that my project was elected best project of the bootcamp! Let me guide you through the process I followed to build this dashboard.
1. The context & the mission
The client: Goodzilla
For this project, I worked with Goodzilla. It’s a French consulting company that helps companies improve their employees’ experience (their happiness and fulfillment at work.)
When they accompany companies, they do that in 2 steps:
- First they send a big “audit” to the employees: a big questionnaire of 80 questions that the employees fill anonymously. This helps Goodzilla draw an “inventory” of the current situation.
- Then this big “audit” can be followed up by small questionnaires twice a month for the company to check the evolution on specific points.
For this project, we focused on the big audit, and especially from the point of view of the person in charge, either a human resources manager, a happiness manager or a company director.
My mission
For now, Goodzilla gathers the results of the audit, creates a pdf file with the most interesting results and their recommendations, and send it to the client.
So my mission was the following:

The goal here, from a business point of view was to make the client autonomous, in order to increase the value of the service.
The challenge
To better understand the challenge it’s important to understand how the questions are separated and how the questionnaire is structured:

- 10 main themes around happiness at work
- Each theme is separated into different sections (2 to 4 depending on the theme)
- Each section is comprised of different questions
Now, I have to make it readable for an HR people (not a data specialist!) to be able to easily read the results.
2. The researches — what does the user expect from the tool?
To understand how I should build the dashboard, I conducted surveys and interviews. (50 answers to my surveys and 4 interviews.)
The main takeaways
- Employees’ happiness and accomplishment is a #1 priority for HR people & company directors. “People are companies’ biggest assets.”
- They are aware of the benefits of anonymous questionnaires: they think it’s the only way to have transparent and reliable feedbacks.
- However, especially for those who have used this kind of tool before, they think that the most difficult part is what comes after the questionnaire: how to understand the main takeaways and know which action to implement. “I don’t want only figures on my dashboard”
The problem
So the problem to solve is:
How might we help HR people be autonomous with the interpretation of the audit results to make them understand easily:
1. the main takeaways of the questionnaire
2. the main actions to implement?
Going from the complex structure of the questionnaire to a smart dashboard

The expectations
After using interviews, surveys, business analysis, user journey and mindmap, I was able to summarize the expectations of the users into 4 main points.

- The tool should be simple and easy to read: HR people are not data analyst, they don’t want a “geeky” dashboard
- It should help in the interpretation of the results: the tool should help HR people notice what are the main takeaways and where the problems exactly are.
- HR people want to be able to filter/compare the results: as they deal with human beings, they are aware that the same questions or the same figures don’t have the same meanings depending on the team for ex.
- They want to be able to involve the managers: they don’t want it to be “just the problem of the HR department.”
The solution
My MVP (minimum viable product) will be a desktop dashboard, as this is the tool on which our users work most of their time.
Thanks to the MOSCOW Method, I was able to prioritize the features and to keep the following as the features of my MVP:
- An easy visualization of the different levels of the 10 themes but also of the main precise takeaways of the questionnaire
- Generic recommendations about what to implement for the weakest themes or a precise takeaways. (Clients will have the possibility to have personalized recommendations by working further with Goodzilla)
- Different levels of filtering the answer
- A collaborative section for all managers to be able to react, give insights..
Paper prototypes
I started with paper prototypes that I tested on my target users.

I had a very positive general feedback on it: people found it “clear”, “smart”, “visual”.
They also gave some precise feedbacks on some details that I had to change, such as the visualization of the 10 themes in the last section of the home page, or the creation of another section that would gather all recommendations, to see them all at once.
I was able to make the changes, before going to the UI part of the process.
Making this dashboard readable!
The atoms
As always, I start with the atoms, which are the smallest elements of my design.

- Blue is my primary color: a comforting color to reassure my users! (who are all a bit scared by the results).
- Green is my accent color to express positive things (but no red for negative things).

I chose to go with classic icons for the menu to make it understandable very easily.
I created a pack of icons for the 10 themes, aways in this idea of making the dashboard visual and easily readable.
Finally, I worked on how to express different levels and atmospheres, always in this idea of not making my users feel guilty.

The prototype
And here is the result! (Prototypes are in French as the client was French).
When you arrive on the dashboard to check the results you arrive on the homepage:

- You first have the global note of the audit, which is a very general indicator to give a first idea, and the number of respondents.
- Then you have the 3 strongest themes and the 3 weakest themes of your audit: it gives you a general idea of your strengths and weaknesses
- But even if it’s general, you already have some notes (blue and red bubbles) informing you about a specific point of your theme, if applicable: “*team A* gave a bad grade to *section xxx*” or “section xxx has been especially well graded”
- then, under this summary, you have all the 10 themes, ranked by grades to give you an overall view of all the themes.
You can filter this general view with a specific population (the answers of one specific team, city, gender or level of management for example). You’ll be able to see that in the video.
Then if you click on a theme, you have the detail of this theme:

- You have the same structure of “summary” of the theme: the general grade, the strongest point, the weakest point.
- Then the different sections of the theme (different tabs) and for each the details of every question of this section.
- You have the same system of small “notes” (in red) if the system detected important gaps in the dividing of answers.
For example here, the systems warns that there is a big difference in the answers of the ‘managers’ and the ‘non-managers’. The button above lets you see the dividing of answers. Cf video - The recommendations are generic and depend on the warnings the system detected. The easy-to-implement recommendations are flagged with a “quick win” tag.
- Finally you have the “comments” part where every manager can collaborate with others.
As I said, all the recommendations of the different themes are gathered in one part, so the users are able to see them all at once, to have a general idea of what to implement first. (This is also helped by the “quick win” tags.)

Finally, you can also check the answers to the three open-questions of the questionnaire.
On the right you have all the answers the employees gave, and on the left, the words that come back most often in the answers. If you click on one word, you only display the answers with this specific word.

On the video, you can check all of these pages, animated on Flinto, and also the 2 levels of filtration in action!
(NB : the interactions in this video are sometimes slow, since this video was initially used as a support for a presentation, so I needed time to speak above the video!)
Conclusion
The conclusion of all that was very positive for me:
- I was able to design a dashboard on a subject I knew nothing about in 2 weeks: The design thinking process was very powerful for me!
- The audience of the Hack Show (the public event where all of the students present their projects) elect my project as the best one of the group.
- My clients were very happy and started to implement my solution the next week.
- But most importantly, the target users found my solution very effective, easily understandable and readable, and wanted to use it!
Don’t hesitate if you have any comments or feedbacks!
