Automating employee engagement & social impact programs for HR teams
Designing the Dashboard — A UX Case Study
Business intelligence is growing and HR is no exception to this growth. Talent is becoming a scarce commodity in today’s workplace especially in the millennial era where millennials are self aware of their value and very comfortable leaving an unappealing job.
As the demand for job satisfaction grows, businesses must seek innovative ways to attract and retain employees. Social impact programs help by providing employee engagement through business immersion, leadership development, and volunteerism.
Companies are challenged when using multiple platforms to plan, track, and obtain feedback for all events and programs. Allowing clients to manage events and programs and have the ability to analyze employee feedback in real-time helps increase overall employee engagement. Enter a new HR platform — EPOCH — connecting employees to community engagement opportunities.
EPOCH is an employee engagement platform for companies to increase social impact and cross-functional connections. EPOCH partners exclusively with top community organizations, personally curates relevant opportunities to employees, and handles logistics end-to-end to put together an event for the workplace.
The Brief and Our Team
The EPOCH dashboard project started with our client, Jade, needing a redesign of EPOCH’s current HR dashboard to make it more user friendly and visually appealing as well as developing the walkthrough process for the user and streamlining the current process to organize, track, and gather feedback for employee events. Our team consisted of 3 UX Designers, which includes myself, and 1 UI Designer, with a project timeline of three weeks.
Scope of Work
Design a Responsive Web Design for an HR platform dashboard focusing on social impact organizations, that also streamlines the process for HR reporting and event planning. This would include Research, UX/UI Design and UX Writing and Microcopy.
The Challenge
HR teams spend a lot of time planning, tracking, and obtaining feedback from employees on corporate events. It is difficult to understand the effectiveness of corporate programs and initiatives, and the direct impact to employee engagement.
Our approach was to design an intuitive platform that streamlines the entire event planning process from beginning to end. Adding new interfaces to the dashboard will improve workflow for the user. HR teams will use one tool to send communication, track attendance, and do reporting for all events, including social impact programs, hence cutting down on scattered workflow from having to use several work platforms.
Designing the HR Dashboard
Research through Interviews and Competitive Comparative Analysis
We began our research through interviewing HR professionals, Lead Recruiters, Community Engagement Specialists, and Event Planning professionals. We wanted to understand the current process for organizing corporate events, including social impact programs and how the outcome of these events apply to boosting the morale of employees. We wanted to find key metrics used to measure employee engagement and retention, understand corporate social responsibility platforms used by companies, and understand current process for coordinating employee volunteer events.
We interviewed professionals in the above fields and we reviewed one case study prepared by EPOCH of a current client, North. From our findings we created an affinity map to help us identify key insights and similarities into the above relationships.
From the responses, we found the following:
- there is great emphasis on workplace culture.
- event planning is very manual for smaller companies and for mid to large size companies, there is a combination of both a manual process and tools that are being used, all of which becomes time consuming.
- effective engagement strategies are critical to businesses, as millennials want to work for companies that do well by doing good, however businesses aren’t able to keep up but they do try to build stronger community presences by partnering with nonprofit organizations.
- feedback is also difficult to collect from employees, but needed to perform meaningful analysis to determine what type of future events should be held.
- millennials have become the largest generation in the workforce since 2016, and they are selective in choosing a workplace and look to be promoted quickly. They have different expectations for company culture and values than their predecessors.
Competitive and Comparative Analysis
HR Employee Engagement and Event Planning were our two main interests. For HR employee engagement, we focused on key features including sharing, community, event engagement, insights & reporting, and communication and volunteering.
Epoch did not have an event calendar so we planned to create a calendar that was easy for HR to use. Since reports for HR on Epoch was pretty basic, we decided to add more in-depth analysis to the new design. As for communication, Epoch has integrated Slack so we added a slack feature.
For event planning, we looked at meet up and eventbrite. Some user-friendly features they have are automatic reminder emails, exportable event details and data in excel and pdf, as well as responsive mobile screen. We incorporated all of these into our redesign.
User Stories, Personas, User Journeys
As a result of all our research, we created 3 distinct personas. However, they all share some common goals and frustrations. A common goal they share is to have better communication between employer and employees for collecting and voicing feedback. A common frustration is scattered workflow due to having to use multiple communication platforms for organizing and attending events.
Some of our user stories were as follows:
“As a Senior Data Analyst, I want to work in an environment filled with like minded individuals that want to give back to the community.”
“As a Community Engagement Manager, I believe Corporate Social Responsibility is integral in the way we conduct business. I want to build an inclusive workplace culture to increase employee engagement and retention.”
“As an HR Specialist, I want to find efficient platforms to help plan events and collect employee feedback, so I can streamline the entire process from beginning to end”
From these user stories we were able to create our personas, Rational Rachel, Proactive Pam, and Innovative Ian.
The User Journey with Ian. Since Ian is our primary potential user for Epoch we did more research on him to understand the whole experience and pain points from Ian’s perspective. We created a user journey for Ian to create and manage a volunteering event.
We found that Ian’s journey was so NOT Efficient with multiple platforms, miscommunication, and unintuitive tools to analyze events and employee engagement.
Lo and Mid Fidelity Wireframes
The first and most important role of lo-fi prototypes is to check and test functionality rather than the visual appearance of the product. So here are our whiteboard mockups and paper sketches that helped us sort our ideas before moving on to mid-fidelity wireframes. From these lo-fidelity sketches we were able to determine what could or may not work for the dashboard.
Moving along, we began the process of creating our Mid-Fi Wireframes where we built the EPOCH HR dashboard design using Figma. Below are a few of the wireframes. We designed a dashboard overview for the home page and we focused on the event and organizations pages since this is where our users perform most of their tasks. We also added analytics and reports to help users gain more insights into what events are most popular, hours an employee has dedicated to volunteering etc.
As you can see there is quite a process to designing a dashboard and of course we need to do some testing.
Usability Testing
We tested 5 users and our goals during usability testing were as follows:
We wanted users to find the end-to-end process of planning and managing an event to be simple and seamless. We wanted HR teams to be able to understand how the company is performing against its goals.
Our insights from testing
- The ‘Create an Event’ process also felt long and extensive. After addressing some visual hierarchy issues and reinventing a new format, it became a much more concise process.
- Users would like more metrics and goals relating to event planning on main dashboard.
The Solution
To help the user spot trends from feedback, an HR dashboard collects the most relevant information — the reports and KPIs you actually care about — and organizes it on one screen. Charts, graphs, and meters visualize this information. Presenting the data graphically helps you monitor everything at a glance and gauge company progress towards goals. You can interact with HR dashboards to drill down when you need more information, and you can customize dashboards to see only high-priority objectives. The dashboard gives the option to create a company’s own events or populate with proposed events from Epoch.
The Design Process
Inception Sheet, Mood Boards, Style Tiles, Hi-Fi Wireframes
Below are the UI Design ideas presented as Inception Sheet, Mood Board, and Style Tile.
The inception sheet was about professional, modern open space. The mood board captured the event planning process again with a feeling of open space and modern colour. The style tile presented neutral colours with the icons used for throughout the design as well as the call to action (CTA) buttons used.
The Final Design!
After we design the UX wireframes we hand our files off to UI to add the final touches such as typography, colour and photos, etc. Below is a look at the responsive design.
The new dashboard has a Home, Events, Organizations, Reports, Analytics and Settings pages. The home is set up as a dashboard user interface with the the nav bar to the left, however on the ipad and iphone the navigation has been changed to a burger menu for better viewing of the pages. The home is an overview of volunteer hours, events held, and employee experience as well as upcoming events, top causes and top events.
On the Events pages the user can create events, see event details and see all upcoming, current, and past events. The user can see who is attending and see how many hours that employee has volunteered to date. The user can see what organization an event is for, what the social impact is as well as what the role and purpose is. HR can also filter and sort through the event list. The calendar view helps to see an overall view of events per month, week and day.
The Organizations pages allows users to see a list of organizations that the company works with through volunteer events.
Reports are downloadable and help track performance.
Analytics allows the user to see goals, uncover trends and anticipate future developments.
Prototype
Here is our prototype, if you are interested please check out the link, EPOCH Prototype.
Conclusion
01. Responsive Web
Web design will render well on main devices used by HR — desktop and mobile screens.
02. Reporting
HR can effectively evaluate and benchmark the current performance against corporate goals and are able to see more analytics and reports.
03. Social Impact
HR can add non-profit partner profiles to the platform as well as non-profit partners provided by Epoch. HR users can understand company social impact through reports.
04. Events
From creating events, tracking employee confirmations and attendance, and collecting employee feedback on corporate events, all is now usable by HR.
Future Considerations
Given that we only have 3 weeks for this project, we could only complete the top priority features. These are some other interesting ideas for future consideration.
- Customized invitations based on employees interests, previous events, and business departments.
- Tailored emails for first-time volunteers, for volunteers who confirmed but forgot to sign the waiver, for people who don’t show up to the event.
- Quantified feedbacks & qualitative surveys and forms for HRs to analyze.
- An employee Dashboard, like the HR dashboard, compare with personal goal and also get a general understanding about the company performance.
- Possibly add more platforms like lync or others.
Thank you
I’d like to thank Jade and her partners for this opportunity to work on this project and we wish her and the Epoch team all the best with their future Epoch partnerships. And a big thank you to my UX/UI team, Kathy, Karen and Laura.
