Culture Booster
Client: Culture Booster is a local startup organization on a mission to improve people’s work lives. Their founder believes that the best way to achieve this is by helping organizations create environments that are conducive to people bringing their best selves to work each day. To achieve this vision, they’ve created an employee engagement software (EES) platform that helps organizations share feedback, improve collaboration, make goals, and capture innovation amongst their employees. Since its launch in June 2021, Culture Booster’s client roster has expanded to include many notable organizations, including Headway Emotional Health Services, People Serving People, and St. Paul Public Schools.
Overview
Problem: Culture Booster was looking for ways to extend their current application’s design with new features to better assist users in the workplace.
Results: Based on research conducted, a home dashboard and 3 features within the homepage were proposed to the client in a report. These features reflected the company’s overall mission and matched a base expectation for the user’s needs.
Approach: Competitive Analysis | Journey Mapping | Stakeholder Interview I Feature Cards | Kano Analysis I Annotated Wireframes
My Roles: Researcher, Designer
The Challenge.
Discover and create extension designs for features that would be of value to users of Culture Booster.
Competitive Audit
The first thing I did was conduct a competitive audit to evaluate features Culture Booster offers, as well as the features of their competitors.
7 competing and comparable websites were evaluated to assess what other features are out there and where Culture Booster’s offerings stand compared to their competitors
Stakeholder Interview
After diving into Culture Booster’s application compared to their competitors, an interview with the stakeholder was conducted to get a better understanding of the company, its mission and values, and the current features of the application.
Journey Map
The next step was to create a user journey to map to demonstrate the user’s work patterns and interactions with the current Culture Booster Application.
I chose to specifically look into the user’s journey of scheduling and attending a meeting during the workday. Based on the stakeholder interview this is not only a large part of an employee’s day, but it is also a key feature of the current application. The Culture Booster Feature Summary is intended to make scheduling a 1 on 1 meeting easy for the user to improve company-wide collaboration.
The journey map shows that with this feature Culture Booster raises the user’s experience of scheduling the meeting and what happens afterward, but the app lacks touchpoints in the before phase.
Concept Cards
Once I had a better understanding of the user’s journey I created 5 concepts of features that would improve the user’s “Before” phase of the journey based on the areas where they experienced pain points.
Kano Analysis
Next, I submitted my features into a large pool of features submitted by the rest of my group and from there 10 features were selected to be put in front of users through an online survey.
Kano Analysis was then used to synthesize user feedback, features were rated based on satisfaction, functionality, and importance to determine which features were the highest priority to develop.
Key Insights
Based on user responses it was determined that the home dashboard is an attractive feature.
Based on user feedback it was also determined that having a homepage after logging in was a base expectation that was necessary to navigate the website.
2 users were unsure about the specific features that gauge feelings and felt it could be hard to use and/or keep private.
Proposed Features
After finalizing my prototype revision plan and creating hand-drawn low fidelity wireframe sketches, I created annotated wireframes using Figma. A consultation with Culture Booster’s lead developer was held to determine the development points of proposed concepts. A scale of 1 point= 1 day was decided upon, and a development budget of 20 points was set for this project.
Homepage Dashboard
Goal: To create a home base that the user is sent to after logging that highlights key parts and important functions of the application
Rationale: Based on the Kano Analysis it was determined that having a landing page after logging in was a base expectation for users. Without this feature 1 user wasn’t sure how they would be able to navigate the website
The user can quickly view all of the outstanding notifications they have.
This feature is used to mark the working location of the user.
The user can mark their current stress level. They have the option to make it public so other users can see or keep it private for their own records.
The user can mark the availability they have open for meetings so that other users can more efficiently set up a meeting with them.
The user can quickly view all of the meetings they have scheduled for the day
2. Location Status
Goal: this feature allows the user to mark their current and future work status so other employees can view it making it easier to set up meetings.
Rationale: the stakeholder interview revealed that many of their clients are adopting hybrid working models (mix of remote and in-person) which makes scheduling meetings between employees more difficult. He wished for a way to help users signal their status to each other to make the scheduling feature of the app run more smoothly.
The user has 3 options. They can mark “In Office” if they are in person, “Remote” if they are working from home, or “Unavailable” if they are either out that day or do not have time for meetings. This would then be shared publicly on their employee information listing to inform their coworkers of their status.
The user has the option of marking their status for the week to make it easier to set up a future meeting
3. Stress Level Indicator
Goal: To help the user keep track of their daily stress, bring awareness to other users’ stress levels, and help keep track of overall company stress level so employers know when they may need to intervene and help boost the company’s culture in a better direction.
Rationale: The current application has a stress indicator that is buried in the meeting scheduler. This feature would serve to bring that feature more forward into the system to help users better empathize with each other throughout the day which is a large mission on the company. Based on the Kano Analysis the original feature design intended to gauge user feelings and sentiments felt too complicated to users, with 1 user stating it would require training to understand how to use it. Therefore the same stress slider that was already in the application was used to keep the feature simple and familiar to users.
The user can mark their current stress level using the slider
The user can keep their stress level private by using this toggle. If this is not toggled to private, their stress level can be viewed by other employees and employers
By clicking this button users can view their personal stress statistics
Using the arrows users can view stats from different weeks or months
By pressing these buttons users can switch from the weekly and monthly view
The user can switch to a pie chart view
4. Meeting Availability
Goal: to help users share what times they are available for meetings, making it easier for other users to coordinate times with needing to send messages.
Rationale: Based on the journey map, there is not currently a feature that allows users to view each other’s availability. This combined with the lack of an internal messaging feature and needing to coordinate with remote users, means users have to reach out using a third-party messaging system to coordinate times. The meeting availability feature could shorten this process by not having to message each other at all to coordinate times, or lessening the amount of back and forth by providing a clearer window into eachother’’s available time slots before reaching out to each other.
This feature lives on the user’s homepage. The user can set as many available time slots as they want.
An inactive screen communicates to the user what the feature’s purpose is. If no times have been added this is what the feature will look like on the page.
To adjust the time the user would slide to the start and end times. This is the same kind of slider used in other features on the application.
To add another time window, the user would hit the plus button and another slider would appear
Culture Booster Proposed Features Report
The final step was to create a report that would be sent to the stakeholders and developers at Culture Booster. The report included all my research findings, Journey Map, Kano Analysis, and Proposed Features as Annotated Wireframes.
Next Steps
Usability Testing
The next step is to conduct user testing to gauge the usability of the new proposed features. This would be conducted to gain insight into the value of the feature and its functionality to see if modifications need to be made.
Internal Messaging Feature
One of the touchpoint needs of the user, based on the journey map, was internal messaging. This feature was estimated to be 11 points and therefore was outside of the budget for this development project. The internal messaging would be a valuable feature to add and would be important to consider for future projects.
Conclusion
Culture Booster’s current application had great features that were easy to use and helped support users during their workday, but there was room to expand these features to make them even better at succeeding in their mission. My goal was to support the client’s vision while helping to determine which features would add the most value to the user’s experience. I proposed 4 features that I felt were the highest priority in the user’s journey I was following. Overall I believe these features would help the Culture Booster’s overall application and better assist the user in their work life.
