Working 9–5
Get your employees to be Culturelike
Greetings to all that have taken a gander at this case study of mine. I’ve noticed that with every posting that I upload, my read time increases. My last post was a whopping 9 minute read (as this one is too 😅),which means that you probably need to look over my stuff while you commute to and from your place of employment. Or take a quick read during your lunch break.
Now I’d wager that my fellow readers are suspecting that there is something up my sleeve in relation to the case study. You would be correct in that assumption, so I will go ahead and ask this rhetorical question: how many of you participate in social activities with your coworkers? By social activities, I am not referring to lunch meet-ups or happy hour. Rather, coworkers are attending culinary classes hosted by Chef Boyardee or taking on Muay Thai training, with Dyllan ‘accidentally’ knocking the wind out of Derek.
I don’t live to work; I work to live- Noel Gallagher
Coming from a personal opinion, we live a manic world. More and more companies now operate on a global capacity, requiring their employees to maintain vigilance on their appointed roles. A company’s success is dependent on profitable quarters. As a result, everyone on deck must strive to move heaven and earth to achieve maximum profitability. So as it goes, our routine will always be the daily hustle of ensuring we maximize our work days. Employees must be able to contribute to the well being of their place of employment.
This by no means is a revelation but there are caveats. In fact a certain American musician (and an icon) sang a song that still prevails today as it did decades ago.
Culturelike
So as it goes, it is of utmost importance for companies to show that they too care for their employees’ well-being. Another important note is that their employees should be able to work in harmony with one another. Nobody wants to be in a toxic atmosphere, where coworkers or management create such negativity that either you transfer out or be forced to resign. I have had several experiences on this matter, but this case study is not about me.
You see, Aldo Silva is a young entrepreneur that tapped the RED Academy crew to assist him on developing a responsive web tool for Human Resources. That tool is Culturelike.
The platform would be a dashboard layout that enables HR to conduct polls and gauge employee interests on various social activities. The end goal for Aldo is for coworkers to experience, and bond over, an array of company sponsored activities. Humans are inherently social creatures, no matter where we are employed at. If we were work in places that social activities were nonexistent, it will only bring people to bond over negativity. As a result a toxic atmosphere has now emerged to perpetuate sour feelings. Before I continue, posted below is small terminology reference for the readers. I will be using this terminology as it is part of the framework that Aldo has coined when utilizing the dashboard.
Bringing Together Great Culture, and Team
As I mentioned before, the dashboard is developed for Culture Managers as a tool for them to manage different events that have been polled and allotted for select days. After an event, there is an opportunity for Culture to review posted comments of that said event. It helps them see what activities are working. When you see coworkers really start to bond positively, the outcome is that work culture becomes vastly more productive, which equates to better business practice across the board. Companies like Google and Facebook, if they don’t have a similar functioning dashboard, can easily utilize this tool should HR require its functionality.
Now I would like add that this tool is also for Ritual Hosts to work with as well. Ritual Hosts would utilize this platform as a point of contact for any Culture Managers. Should they require a Host for ritual services, that host would be able to look within his/her/their platform and see and manage their availabilities. Plus they can see their earnings throughout the month and gauge themselves on where they are able to maximize their ritual services.
To get this project started, as usual a new team was assembled to bring forth what Aldo envisioned. Jimmy Foulds was the only member to be carried forward with me from the Open Stage project. Paired with him on the UX front is Tiffany Ho, ever bright and hawk-eyed in weeding out errors. Paired with me on UI front is Shees Saeed, a man who is soft-spoken but ever thorough with his work. Together, we developed a robust platform that would be used by hundreds of Culture Managers.
Inception, Moods and Tiles
Like all the projects before me, and many more to come after, there is a process to develop any given platform. Since I am from the UI side of things, Shees and I conduct our research and development by first drafting out an Inception framework for Culturelike before moving on to visual inspirations.
Shees and I felt that a softer colour scheme worked better than having brighter palettes as we do not want the Culture Mangers and Ritual Hosts to get distracted by non-essential colours. Once we got Aldo to take a look, he opted for the blue colour schemes but adding more grey tones to be worked on the dashboard. Now Sheese and I did conduct some logo exploration (you can see a glimpse of them on the style tiles) but the original Culturelike logo is pretty strong in its design so we kept it as is. It invokes the diversity of culture by showing four colour representations as well as the abstract representation of people extending their arms to one another. Kudos to the person who developed the logo for Aldo.
Above I’ve placed the colour arrangement of the Style Guide. You can see adding levels of opacity can create hierarchal levels, be it for background or text colouring. Your eyes would automatically focus on important information first based on the colouring utilized. Importantly our dashboard colour schemes have to be user accessibility compliant for people who are unable to see a full colour spectrum. Within the next few years many Canadian sites will have to contain accessibility friendly colours, something that will be archived in the history of web design. If you’re curious about accessibility for web design colours check out Accessible Colors
Dashboard
I’m sure some of readers are thinking, “What’s a dashboard?” “Is it like the dashboard on my car?!” Well, yes and no.
To directly quote off of Wikipedia,
“A dashboard is a type of graphical user interface which often provides at-a-glance views of key performance indicators relevant to a particular objective or business process. In other usage, “dashboard” is another name for “progress report” or “report.”
So while vehicle dashboards, like the one pictured above, do have similar objectives, our dashboards are strictly geared for static surfaces and for more corporate relevant information. That is unless you’re using the Culturelike dashboard on your phone, while you’re in your car. In which case, please keep your phone away to avoid distracted driving.
Now a typical dashboard would seem rather dry, but it is a very useful tool to have to keep all relevant information within a few clicks. It sounds easy enough, just create a dashboard and ‘paint it’ pretty. In actuality, there is heavy research conducted by both UX and UI to ensure that layouts and colour schemes go hand in hand when the dashboard Mid-fi is undergoing Hi-Fi(formalizing the look). Dashboard colour schemes not only have to work well for accessibility needs, they have to work well in a responsive layout too. In our case with Culturelike the UX team placed information within ‘cards’. These cards, when deployed on mobile or tablet platform are reorganized and then stacked in a hierarchal format. Relevant information is instantly accessible for users while secondary can either tapped up or swiped. What does that mean for the UI team? Essentially the colour scheme would be the same with a minor difference. As an example, the blue navigation bar on the left side is prevalent on a desktop as a point of reference. However once you transfer over to a mobile platform, the bar is hidden away, only to slide out when needed. This is because the blue will only serve to distract the Managers or Hosts when they access their mobile devices
Anti-climatic Reveal
Usually I like to do a more grandiose reveal like I did with my prior case study but in this instant I’m going to keep it simple:
Ok so I do have some pretty shots
Critical Thinking
Project Five was not as flashy as my prior project, but it is good to have variety. I am still a young Padawan on my way to be a Jedi Knight. Someday I will master the UI Force, for I know it is strong within me. In the meantime, Sheese and I got to play within a more sedated colour ways and pulled off an elegant looking dashboard.
Now that this project has wrapped up, so has my time in the land of UI. It’s been wonderful to begin my journey in this aspect of user interface design. I’ve acquired newfound insights and solid skills in these past three months. Leo, my instructor has been amazing, offering his guidance when needed. This journey if mine is not quite over though (and it never will be). Next I will be in the realm of UX, where my case studies will give more in depth analysis of how and why we even develop interactive interfaces.
Farewell folks. Let me leave you a song that keeps me forever in the eighties
