Feedback, a meaningful tool to grow
Feedback is essential to grow and improve in different contexts of life. The performance review is a common activity in workplaces, however, it is normally oriented to employees’ evaluation. The goal of this project was to launch a software as a service (SaaS) desktop web app for companies to use internally that enabled employees to give feedback to the managers.
Getting to know the user and the problem
To start the process and confirm that this was a real need for the companies, I decided to conduct a semi-structured interview with 3 managers from different departments and 3 employees in TravelPerk, a big startup established in Barcelona. The next image summarizes some of the insights I could gather from the managers and the employees.
Besides the interviews, I did a comparative analysis with two existent tools for performance review: Bamboo HR and Master QR. Both include a dashboard that condenses a lot of information, so the user can see everything at one glance.
To facilitate the user-centered design process, I created two user personas, representing my two target users: Carla, the manager, and Núria, the employee.
How does "Manager" work?
Carla is the manager of the team. She wants to check the survey she has created for her employees. She also wants to see the profile of Núria, one of her employees and request a “one to one” with her to talk about her progress in the last weeks.
Challenges
This video shows the final prototype of “Manager” in one of its versions: the Manager’s dashboard. Getting to this point required many tests and iterations. In this process, I faced several challenges, some of them can be seen next:
“Manager” includes performance graphs because the managers wanted to have the information in a very visual way. Initial linear graphs were changed for a more suitable type of graph for this subject: the radar graphs.
Some words were confusing or problematic for the testers.
On the one side, people understood “Open feedback” as something “public” and “closed feedback” as something “private”. These words were changed for “comments” and “scores”, respectively. Later, the word “scores” was changed by “team assessment” for a better understanding.
On the other side, “One on one” was changed by “one to one”, because the former, reminded the user to a “fight”, which was exactly what I didn’t want to cause.
The initial prototype was very simple, however, managers wanted to access the information at one glance, and they were not worried about having a denser dashboard because they were used to work with a lot of data.
This challenge was probably the most important trigger to implement more radical changes to my design. From a minimalistic dashboard, the design evolved to a more complex, but still attractive panel of information. Here you can see some of the changes:
Once the structure and the content were clear I focused my work on the selection of the color palette. Some of the values I wanted to inspire in the user were: accessibility, transparency, honesty, and youth. Based on them, I developed the following style tile:
What's next?
This project was developed in 7 days, but it’s still active because as a designer I have some long-term goals with it.
This was my first project with a real company as a UX/UI designer. It gave to me an incredible experience and a strong opportunity to improve my researching and testing skills in a very real context. I want to thank TravelPerk for the support and collaboration in this project. Without it, this would haven’t been possible.
The following is just a summary of some of my “takeaways” with this project.
