peer-to-peer recognition and rewards platform
Designer - 1, Developer - 6, Q.A - 1, Marketing & sales - 2, Product Manger - 1
Overview
SpringEngage is a peer-to-peer recognition and rewards platform that enriches your company culture. It virtually brings recognition and fun within your Slack and MS Teams workspace.
Problem
Employee recognition has become a broken system
The ongoing remote-work environment has brought employee engagement to the spotlight and the office has a new address and it’s on Slack/MS Teams.
4 key issues which make it a broken system...
⏳ Timely recognition
👍 Appreciations are often done in silos (1v1 meetings)
👨💻 Engaging system
🏖 Remote work - New addition to the existing set of issues
Our Approach
We understood this challenge and created a system. We first built it for ourselves after looking for something that would meet our needs. Then friends, partners, and clients who saw the system asked if they could use it. They had the same challenge: How to engage remote employees?
Proposed Solution
Based on our user research we listed features and aspects to define and differentiate our Product.
🎯 Allow peer to peer recognition
🎯 Bottom up approach - Teams can co-exist independently and cumulatively form an org.
🎯 Make the rewards and recognition more meaningful for the employees
🎯 Let companies decide what this recognition (points) translate to (eg. currency, coupons/vouchers, etc)
🎯 Offer a configurable solution to organizations or even individual teams to be better able to recognize employees and keep a track of it
🎯 Ensure that the interaction is frictionless, i.e, employees do not have to move to a different interface / application to recognize each other
My responsibilities
- For every project I work on, I like to loop in all the stakeholders and Engineers associated with the project as early as possible. Defining who these members are is crucial to a project’s success.
- I was asked to own the design and User Experience process from end to end while partnering with Engineers, Product Owners, and Business stakeholders.
- Initially I was involved in scoping out the features as a part of Product team.
Design Process
Define goals > User research > Define personas > Wireframes > Designing UI
I started off with defining the goal for Designs, Then took help from the marketing and sales team for user research as they were involved with the project since it's early days and then once these were nailed. I started working on wireframes, next working in a low-fidelity mockup form, I started to layout the specific of the UI for this new view, which would be the home of the SpringEngage Dashboard.
While reaching milestones, I would check in with stakeholders within our company as well as fresh-eyed individuals to gather feedback and make improvements.
Goal:
Make recognition and rewarding employees - insightful, engaging, easy and timely
User research:
2 approaches we took for user research
👉🏻Customer Interviews This was done by marketing and sales team who took ownership and helped by sharing inputs with the Product team. We reached out to above user personas with a bunch of questions and the tool we built for in house use
👉🏻Competitor analysis through social listening, using those products internally and identifying shortcoming
User personas:
👩💼 Manager👩💻 Creator👨💻 Team members👥 Guests🏢 Org Owner/System Admin - HR/Finance/OperationsDeliverables
- Insights were quickly distilled into something that could be quickly built and put into the hands of beta testers.
- Design solutions that feel cohesive on 3 different platforms (Slack, MS Teams and GChat)
- Define the UI style-guide for the app
- Slack commands + nudges (working with content team)
- Make prototypes for upcoming features with Sales team
- I also created a component library and set of design principles to allow the team to continue building out and prototyping features.
Wireframe
Designs & Challenges
Onboarding
Onboarding is a critical aspect of SpringEngage dashboard. This is user action intensive and shouldn't be skipped for the smooth functioning of the product and hence critical.
What happens in onboarding screens?
We had to map this data for the smooth functioning of the product. So, it was critical to assign manager for each person. But it wasn't a scalable solution. Time constraints and tighter deadlines warranted a quick solution. So, this was the initial version.
The issues with this solution were -
⛔️ Time consuming process for users
⛔️ High drop-off from onboarding because of intensive user inputs requirements
⛔️ No clear differentiation while mapping between managers and team members
So, we had to come up with a solutions which
✅ Makes it a scalable solution for bigger orgs.
✅ Check the drop-off rate in onboarding
✅ Have clear differentiation between Managers and Team members
Solution to challenge
After some ideations and discussions, we decided on splitting the onboarding. Solution was staring us at our faces - Progressive disclosure, one of the basic principles of UX.
Don't overwhelm the user with all the information at once, split it into steps and ask whatever minimum is required to complete the process.
Onboarding is the place where we build teams/map people for the product to function - This is split into two parts
- Selecting all the managers of the workspace
- Assigning remaining members to a particular manager
These two actions sum up the creation of team for the engagement and reward system to function.
But it was still missing the scalable solution...
Result:
- Mapping members to manager
- Progressive disclosure leading to better experience there by reducing the drop-off rate by 64% (Data from redux)
Transaction screen
Final solution
Admin Screens
As the product started growing, it became critical to divide flows based on access
- Admin access
- Regular user access
The GIF you see below is that of Admin access screen, with all the settings
Over and above
Learnings
- Organizing Information Architecture for scaling and categorizing related sections
- Progressive disclosure to engage users and prevent drop-offs
- Working closely with sales team for Demo helped understand the different use cases
Going forward
- Company values in rewards - You can now tag a company value someone has demonstrated. Its neat way of showing that you recognize someone's efforts to uphold the company values!
- Kudos / Shoutout for more than one person - Ever felt like multiple people got the job done ? Now you can send kudos / shoutout to multiple people at the same time. This works well for moments where multiple people come together to do something remarkable.
- Add-on to kudos or shoutout - Wanted to appreciate someone for the same thing that someone else already highlighted? Now you can add-on to the kudos / shoutout that someone has gotten and show that you too feel the same. But it gets better, add-ons also work with multiple people being given kudos / shoutouts.
- Move to popups for rewarding - Want to appreciate someone but forgot the format of the command ? Fear not, you can simple search for
Appreciate someonein the shortcuts menu or type/springand it will bring up an easy to use popup to give kudos / shoutouts.
- No need for slash commands in private DM - When having your 1 on 1 time with the SpringEngage bot on DM, you don't need to enter slash commands anymore. The SpringEngage bot doesn't want you to spend more time than you need to (It has feelings too, you know ?). When in DM, typing
meinstead of/spring mewill do the same thing.
Impact
Since the adoption at SpringWorks, our version has helped bring sense of camaraderie to our remote work culture. Here are some stats:
- Overall transactions - Overall - 307
- Shoutouts - 59
- Kudos - 235
At the end of the day, SpringEngage hopes to encourage recognition and rewarding employees - insightful, engaging and easy.
Some other projects