Building an award-winning application in just four months
In October 2020, Moodtracker by Workhuman was named a Top HR Product of the Year by HR Executive Magazine. This was an amazing achievement, especially considering that we built the application in just four months in the middle of a global pandemic. Here’s how we did it.
Let’s start at the very beginning….
In late 2019, Workhuman decided to get into the survey business.
At the time, people leaders and HR departments who wanted to survey their teams faced two painful choices:
- Struggle with Survey Monkey or Google Forms to put together a survey, wondering which questions to ask and how to create a robust survey which would uncover what they wanted to know or
- Pay potentially large sums of money (sometimes huge sums) to data companies to run surveys for them or give them a template they could use to analyze their organization, with no guarantee it would provide them with the correct diagnosis.
This was particularly painful for companies with 1,000 employees or fewer, who struggled for the time or budget to be able to take either choice.
Our solution
Workhuman decided to launch its solution at Workhuman Live in San Antonio, Texas, in May 2020.
Moodtracker would solve these problems by offering a set of pre-configured surveys, designed by Workhuman’s data scientists. The application would automatically ensure companies asked the right questions at the right time, for free. Forever. Companies could choose to send single surveys or recurring questionnaires that would automatically generate surveys so they could get an ongoing sense of how their employees were feeling.
Moodtracker would include automatically-generated recommendations and insights to help customers understand how they could improve their organization culture, spending their money on effective solutions instead of problem identification.
Workhuman decided to diversify its existing infrastructure by taking a Cloud-native and mobile-first approach to the application. Moodtracker would be the first AWS-hosted Workhuman Cloud application.
Getting up and running
Workhuman hired a dedicated team (including yours truly) to build the application. Workhuman Live represented the finish line for a rapid deployment. The product team worked together closely and focused on the art of the possible.
To support a launch in May 2020, the team agreed to a minimal feature set with stakeholders: 1 survey instrument with multiple-choice, Likert scored (Strongly Agree, Agree, Not Sure, Disagree, Strongly Disagree). The team wanted to deliver a global solution, so supporting multiple languages and accessibility were musts.
The team created a plan based on two-week increments of delivery.
Lean and meaningful
Given the need to move quickly, the team prioritized learning over perfection and created a series of prototypes. This allowed us to iterate quickly based on stakeholder feedback.
We wanted taking our surveys to be fun and engaging so we experimented with different question types and styles: from sliders, to buttons, to text boxes. We experimented to learn what would be effective for our users.
We spent the first six weeks iterating the functionality and were able to deploy our first survey. The application now supported three languages and had incorporated open-text questions and answers. We introduced sentiment analysis on the open-text answers. Our workflow was maturing and things were starting to take shape…
..and then the pandemic hit. We suddenly found ourselves working from home and adapting to what would soon be known as ‘the new normal.’ We added a new Resiliency survey to the application to offer companies the chance to take stock of employee wellbeing at a time of unprecedented stress and workplace turmoil.
Even the launch goes remote
As the impact and range of the pandemic became clear, Workhuman Live was no longer tenable as an in-person event (remember those?) and moved online. Now that it was no longer venue-dependent, the date became fluid. Workhuman explored bringing Workhuman Live forward to mid-April. We figured out what we could deliver in that time and breathed a sigh of relief as the date for the online event moved back to May 12th.
We finalized the UI of the application, loaded the surveys, and implemented our localization functionality. We ran out of time to complete automatic testing and we had to push some functionality around managing survey respondents past launch, but we made it.
It’s alive….ish!
And so, on May 12th, with much fanfare, we launched. Moodtracker had:
- 4 surveys
- In 34 languages
- Global benchmarks
- Sentiment analysis
We were delighted and proud of what we’d achieved. It worked perfectly at launch. And then it didn’t.
Recurring surveys weren’t being sent. The second and third surveys people expected to receive didn’t arrive. We were distraught. What had gone wrong?
We finally tracked down the cause of our pain. Some test records were causing intermittent failures now that the application was in production. After almost two weeks of bug hunting, we found our fix.
Happy ending?
After four months (and a bug fix), we had an application to be proud of. The validation of winning an award at the end of the year felt great and gave us an opportunity to reflect on all of the amazing work that went into a rapidly-created product. It was quite the journey from worrying to award-winning.
