Benefits of Gratitude | Case Study
DevMountain Design Challenge
Introduction
During this project my team and I were tasked to research the problem that the majority of people feel unappreciated at work.
How can we build a solution that shows users and businesses the benefits of gratitude in the workplace.
Business Challenges
Initially we had a hard time understanding how me might quantify gratitude. So we did some research to see what solutions were already out there, and what people had to say about their workplace. We noticed a few competitors provide a platform that allows users to transfer money to praise their peers. We made an assumption that most employees want monetary prizes for their hard work. But now it was time to interview a few individuals to test our hypothesis and get some more data.
Team
Nathan Maus (Me), UX Designer
April Li, UX Designer
Ty Maxey, UX Designer
Research
We wanted to test a few different research methods since this was our first project at DevMountain. Even though some methods were very intimidating.
- I wanted to start out with man-on-the-street interviews. One lady told us that she had quit her previous job because no one ever thanked her for her hard work. This helped us realize that our users needed a way to praise each other.
- Then we created a quick survey that was sent out via LinkedIn and Facebook as well. The biggest thing we noticed from our users, money wasn’t what people wanted most. They wanted a more personal connection with their coworkers, and they wanted to be heard by their bosses and executives.
This helped us get a grasp on the frustrations that many people run into at work and start building our persona. But I still wanted to here the other side of the story. What were businesses doing to promote and show gratitude in the workplace? Finally, I got 2 interviews scheduled.
The first interview was with Austin Rynders, an operations manager at a multi-billion dollar research hospital. We learned a lot from the experiences he’s had with his own employees. Two huge factors came out in this interview. One, everyone likes recognition in different ways; this means that no matter what you do it’s going to be hard to please everyone. Next, I asked Austin if there were any initiatives that he tried implementing that completely failed. They had an initiative that involved writing someone’s name on a star and recognizing them for going above and beyond. Then each month a manager would pick a star off the wall and that employee would receive a gift card. This initiative ended because inappropriate comments and jokes were being written instead of appreciation towards other coworkers. This helped us in determining the constraints and methods in which an employee would be able to recognize another coworker. We made it required to tag a coworker so this wouldn’t happen with us. Also because of this, we realized we didn’t want this to become a message board so we restricted the feed to recognition without additional comments.
The second interview I setup was with the VP of People Operations, Kat Judd, from Lucid Software. The CEO of Lucid Software wrote an article a few months before, about the benefits of gratitude in the workplace. After reading the article I knew I had to talk with someone there. The first thing I noticed when we arrived, was the shelf filled with awards that different employees had received. Kat was a pleasure to speak with and had a lot of insights on how a leading company, like Lucid, treated it’s employees.
Two things that stood out to me:
- They had an unlimited amount of thank you cards at the front desk that you could use to write someone a quick thank you. Kat mentioned that these were the most memorable gifts she ever received at work. These seemed so genuine to me that we added a way to send a gift card from our store.
- They have a channel on Slack that is dedicated to giving quick shout outs to your fellow coworkers. This stood out to me because at this point we decided that employees would be given a specific amount of points each month to use on other people. But this was a quick way they could recognize someone without dipping into their points.
Persona and User Story Map
This is the persona we created from the research conducted by my team
We compiled our research and created our primary persona, Justin. This helped us understand our users goals and create a design that fit their needs. Justin wanted:
- To open communication between upper management and employees
- To personally recognize coworkers more often
- To connect with his peers on a more personal level
It was difficult to create a solution that would help our users show genuine appreciation while still remaining organic. Most solutions already out there, seemed more of a novelty. I spoke with someone that said at he used Motivosity, and would trade dollars with his friends instead of appreciating his coworkers.
We addressed this by staying away from cash rewards because we felt that these weren’t very personal. My team and I brainstormed ideas that could feel personal but were also practical.
What can someone give you that makes you feel grateful? For Christmas it’s nice to receive an envelope of cash, but you are always more thankful when you get something that you want.
Because of this brainstorm session and the research we conducted, we created a gifting solution that helps employees give personal gifts to each other for their hard work. These gifts could include company swag, gift cards, and other gear depending on what the business wanted to use for gifts.
To keep open communication between upper management and employees we decided to create a Q/A board. Here the user could ask questions of any team, in a public setting, then someone from that team could reply to that question. We had this at Netflix and it was so nice to get an answer about a decision that was made or to just inform another team of an issue. We also created an Awards section, this would allow upper management to showcase employees hard work.
For Justin to personally connect with and recognize his peers we designed these features:
- Profile page, which is very detailed, allows him to learn more about someone.
- Meetup feature, allows him to tell people that he’s going to grab lunch, coffee, etc and his peers could attend that meetup with him.
- Wishlist, allows him to personalize his gifts and get to know his peers likes and dislikes.
- Points. Justin is given a specific amount of points each month, which he can redeem in the store and send someone a gift.
- High-5 feature, allows him to give someone a quick shoutout in the main feed without using his points.
- Nominations, allows Justin to nominate his coworkers for fun monthly awards.
Sketching and Wireframes
Our next step was to start sketching. Our team was great at being open to feedback and making changes to their designs. I chose these designs because they were informative and fun. The different message states look like comment bubbles from users, which creates a fun personal feeling when someone recognizes a peer. I designed the homepage dashboard to have important acts of gratitude front and center, then it shows monthly awards and nominations on the right hand side for everyone to see. I also thought added little icons for different styles of recognition (recognize, high-5, meetup) next to each message on the dashboard so it would be easily identifiable to other users.
At this point we started creating low fidelity wireframes, but our consistency was lacking across our designs. So, I took the initiative to create a library in Sketch that we could all use to keep our designs consistent. We were now ready for our design review.
Design Review and Testing
We presented our low-fidelity wireframes to our peers and received great feedback during this design review. Some people were concerned with how users might portray the heart icon as inappropriate. Also they wanted more details on the profile page, such as size or brand of items they’d like.
With this information we changed it up a little bit. We realized that we had a like button and a love button because that’s what other platforms used. We decided that it wasn’t necessary to have a love (heart) button in this setting because it is a design that will be used strictly at work. As for the profile page, we created an option to setup a wishlist. This way when someone wants to appreciate a coworker they can personalize it with a gift from their wishlist, without having to worry about if they’d like it or what size they needed.
Once we changed those few considerations we created a task flow to test our users. This helped us gauge if users actually understood how to interact with our design. A few things stood out right away.
The first task was to ask their marketing team a question. This ended up taking the longest amount of time. Our users had a hard time finding the Q/A board and most ended up at the teams page. The team page only showed the employees in each department and didn’t have a way to ask them a question.
- To address this we changed the label from Q/A to Questions and added an Ask button next to each team name on our Teams page. These two changes made it easy for our users to navigate to the correct page.
The last thing they had an issue with was sending anonymous feedback to upper management. We created a feature to allow users to send feedback to HR, they could send it anonymously if they liked. A lot of people thought the feedback option was for the actual web app or they didn’t know who was going to receive their feedback.
- We struggled with how to label this and make it more known to the user. I took a step back and looked at the bigger picture. There wasn’t one instance in our research that someone needed a way to complain about their boss. We realized that we had created an assumption that Justin had an issue talking with his manager, and this feature wasn’t necessary for our users.
- We ended up removing the feedback feature since it didn’t align with our users goals.
We tested our design after fixing these two issues, we were now ready to dive into the visual design aspect of this project.
Visual
Our tone for this project was fun and whimsical so our colors and logo had to represent that tone. Our colors kept changing because it just didn’t feel right to me. When we started our color scheme didn’t feel fun and inviting. We wanted people to feel welcomed, happy, and heard. We did some further research to find out what colors may represent these feelings. We finally chose a main color, and 2 accent colors based off this research.
- Blue was chosen for our main color because it represents good communication and trustworthiness.
- Yellow represents cheerful and happy.
- Orange, adventure and creativity.
After that I applied certain elements of Google’s Material Design. Their approach has been successful with dashboard style designs because it creates a sense of depth to each element. We prototyped the flow of this design with InVision.
Once we prototyped the flow we tested users again. Users were happy that the feedback button was removed as it confused them too much. When we added color to the design, users understood the hierarchy and functionality much better.
Then using Principle, we prototyped the aspect of gifting one of your peers.
Overall, we got great results from our users and I am very happy with our design given the short period of time we had to complete the project.
How we Measured Success
The way we measured success for this project was by gauging how users interacted and understood our design. Users had an easy understanding of how the design worked and could navigate through the tasks with ease. If this design was implemented, we would measure employee retention over the next year to see if the business’ retained more employees. We would also measure employee engagement to see if people used the product frequently.
Lessons Learned
- One of the biggest lessons I learned from this project is to always make sure you are designing for your users and not yourself. It’s easy to get carried away and convince yourself that your decision is for the user but always test it against your personas.
- Seeing eye to eye can be hard. It’s so important to work together though so you have to look at something from another person’s view. Everyone can add something productive and everyone is working towards the same goal.
- Test, Test, Test! Without testing there is no way to know if your design is going to work. Obviously, I know exactly how the design functions because I built it. But the first time someone sees your design they should be able to use it, and there’s only one way to find out if that’s possible… test it.
If I had more time
One aspect of the design we didn’t touch on too much was onboarding. Onboarding is a very important aspect, our platform is relatively easy to use but could use some help to understand all functionality. I would take the coach mark approach to our onboarding process. This would allow our users to get right into using the product but would guide them along let them know what specific functions do.
