Culture
Booster

A Human Resources Software as a Service platform
encouraging team engagement and open ended communication.

 

 Scope & Deliverables

Culture Booster desires an accessible, usable software that efficiently allows its users to collaborate and engage with their team members in a safe, transparent way. I used journey maps, tech scoping and kano analysis to design high fidelity wire frame suggestions to expand a developing SAAS.

Role: Researcher | Designer

Methodology: Competitive Audit | Stakeholder Interview | Directed Storytelling | Affinity Diagramming | User Journey Map | Feature Cards | Storyboards | Tech Scoping | Dot Voting | Sketching | Kano Analysis | High Fidelity Wireframes

Tools: Miro | Figma | Google Sheets | Pen & Paper

Team: Danielle Byers | Missy Holmes | Jamie Tan

The Challenge At Hand

The Client: Culture Booster is a Minnesota-based, bootstrapped, business 2 business startup whose core belief is that organizations need to enrich their environments to ensure their teams are bringing their best selves into the office. Their mission is firmly rooted in the system that this enrichment requires prioritization in four areas; Feedback, goal-transparency, collaboration and innovation.

Covid drove organizations to pivot to hybrid workplaces, opening a window for  Culture Booster to truly shine. The stakeholders of this Software- As- A Service (SAAS) reached out to our team to provide suggestions and insights on the usability of their current software as well as ideas on the development of additional features they desire to have implemented. Keeping their four pillars in mind, I developed potential solutions that focused on the users experience in collaboration and innovation, diving into to my inner empath through a researchers lens.

Client’s Goals

Culture Booster models its success through four key areas:

  • Summary

  • Survey

  • Suggestions

  • Strategy

Stakeholders are looking for opportunities to meld these areas into their four pillars of Feedback, Goal-Transparency, Collaboration and Innovation to enhance the users experience among the workplace. Culture Booster desires an accessible, usable software that efficiently allows its users to collaborate and engage with their team members in a safe, transparent way.

  • Primary Users

    Executives looking for data to inform their strategy | Managers looking for support to reach their goals | Employees looking for true empowerment to increase engagement

  • Secondary Users

    Consultants looking for a tool to provide added value to their networks and services.

 The Process

Competitive Audit of existing platforms and their key features.

Competitive Audit

To begin the research process, my team assessed the strengths and weaknesses of comparable human resource tools that are currently on the market. Having very little knowledge of how these kinds of tools are being used among workplaces allowed me to really dive in and learn about all the possibilities a work enhancement platform could provide. Popular trends included:

  • Posting feeds based on positivity

  • Interactive games

  • Point Systems

  • Gift card distributions for a job well done

Focus on user flows, interaction, UI elements helped determine that equal employee and managerial engagement were possible tools to implement within Culture Boosters existing platform.

Walking it Through

We gained further insights regarding Culture Booster with a stakeholder kickoff call. Getting to know the stakeholder opened my eyes to the true empathy and gratitude that was driving the ship behind Culture Booster’s intended purpose, to empower employees and provide managers the support to encourage this environment. Now, to determine the possible tools to implement these desires through a SAAS.

After the stakeholder kickoff call, I created a current state user journey map using an assumption-based approach that leveraged insights provided through the interview. In order to carry out this journey, I noted any pain points and opportunity areas within problem spaces I experienced along the way as I completed key tasks within a self designated scenario and persona, leveraging an empathetic lens behind a managerial standpoint.  

I chose to approach this map through the lens of a manager, walking through steps from discovery to execution and implementation in my organization. Keeping my employees best interest in mind, while also wanting to navigate the analytical capabilities of the tool, my journey emphasizes questions and pain points of missing elements while highlighting an opportunity areas to better improve Culture Booster.

Insights:
I found implementing a journey map at this phase to be challenging and incomplete because it left a vast space to hypothesize user situations in a framework I was relatively unfamiliar with. If timing had allowed, contextual inquiries of users would have been helpful in determining a more thorough and complete journey through the lens of a user.

User Journey Map created in Figma

Feature Cards

After completing these initial research phases and assessing my journey map, I sketched low fidelity wireframes of suggested screens that highlight new features or expanded opportunity to better address the goals of Culture Booster. As a group, we created over 80 Feature Cards and shared them within a FigJam board. After careful sorting of overlying themes, we met with the lead developer of Culture Booster to tech scope the timing of each suggestion. As a group, we used dot voting to narrow down features we wanted to focus on based on the estimated completion time and priority.

This phase was incredibly insightful in learning to communicate and design ideas based on the cost of time from a developer lens. Although the features were broken down into theme, there were redundancies that helped in prioritizing the ten features to work on.

Primary focus groups included:

  • Implementing a Stars feature and a submission flow

  • Landing page upon login

  • Suggestions page and submission flow

Based upon these findings, I was allotted a budget of 20 development points (where 1 point ~ 1 day of development work) to design features through high fidelity prototypes.

Annotated Wireframes

Further insights were gathered through a Kano Analysis assessment using survey results from current users’ feedback on the proposed features. Using quotes and responses, I was able to determine what the user truly valued to validate my design proposals.

List of Features:

  • Welcome Landing Page- 6 development points

  • Stars Landing Page- 7 development points

  • Sending Stars Page- 3 development points

  • Culture Theme Key Words Page- 3 development points

Total Development Points: 19 points

To demonstrate the importance of these proposed features, I constructed an updated journey map that highlighted the differences in user emotion and experience with both the presence and absence of these features.

Updated User Journey demonstrating the absence and presence of the proposed new features and flows.

 

  1. Landing Page

This proposed feature includes the implementation of a Home button in the navigation bar. Upon signing into Culture Booster, the user will be introduced to the Welcome Landing Page. This top feature will be consistent throughout team members, with the summary below available to executives and managers. As it currently stands, upon login users are brought to a page of analytical graphs. The proposal of this feature will allow for every team member to assess a quick overview of their upcoming workday.

Estimated Development Time: 6 Points

“A Landing Page seems necessary to do anything else related to Culture Booster”-Participant

Annotated Features:

  1. Home Navigation with Summary

  2. Welcome Widget with emotions scale and daily check-in

  3. Calendar and Daily Agenda

  4. Work status toggle and team member board.

2. Stars Landing Page

Culture Booster was looking to implement an encouraging reinforcement tool among their platform. Their acronym for this system was STARs

  • S: Recognize a Situation

  • T: What was the Task this team member demonstrated

  • A: What Approach was taken to demonstrate this task

  • R: What were the Results

Estimated Development Time: 7 Points

Kano Analysis results further supported the implementation of this tool

“I love the ability to comment on stars! Get the good feedback going! Stars on stars on stars!”- Participant

Annotated Features:

  1. Stars Navigation button with Feed

  2. Stars tabs including : All Stars (feed), My Stars (stars received) and Given Stars (stars that have been submitted by the user)

  3. Stars Feed with all the most recent stars and ability for users to comment and like recognition post

  4. Send a Star Button

 
 
 

3. Sending Stars Feature

This feature pops up after the user clicks on the Set Star button from the Stars landing page. It allows the user to start typing the name of a team member and tag additional team members in the post, a feature that seemed to lack in among competitors from my initial audit.

Estimated Development Points: 3 Points

Annotated Features:

  1. Name input with dropdown to select multiple team members

  2. Title Buttons

  3. Comment space to briefly highlight the STAR steps in users own words

  4. Quality Key Words feature to select emphasis on words that tie back to the organizations goals.

  5. Send button that allows for post to be anonymous

4. Key Words

A Stars navigational tool that allows for expansion on pre selected themes and goals within the organization. A customizable tool to better enhance, analyze and track specific themes among team members as a whole.

Estimated Development Points: 3 Points

Annotated Features:

  1. A reference list with description and highlighted key words and qualities broken down and selected based on the organization’s goals and desires.

 

 Conclusion and Next Steps

Research showed that implementing a recognition feature called “Stars” was a desirable addition to enhancing Culture Boosters goals with work place engagement. This specific project left for room to hypothesize as well as synthesize usability findings to come up with wireframes that demonstrate the proposed features. To further build out this software when time allows a proposed flow for Suggestions, an open communication ideas platform among the organization utilizing Culture Booster, would be the next step. This flow would include active ideas that team members can “up-vote”, pending proposals and past proposals that have been passed upon or passed through. I would build up high fidelity wireframes to demonstrate this flow.