Culture Booster
The Future of Work Begins with Culture
Overview
Ever since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, many companies and organizations transitioned to a remote or hybrid working environment where there was disruption in work social life and culture. That is why CultureBooster was created - to boost culture within the work environment on a virtual platform despite the distance between colleagues. Now, Culture Booster’s mission is to improve their software to create more engagement within companies.
The software is currently still in the process of adding new features so through secondary research and kano analysis, my group and I created high-fidelity wireframes to pitch as possible designs for the stakeholder’s Stars and Suggestions features.
My Role:
UX/UI Designer and Researcher
Tools:
Google Docs
Sticky Notes,
Zoom
Pen and Paper
Figma
Methods:
Stakeholder Interview
Competitive Audit
Design Concepts
Journey Mapping
Prototyping
Deliverables:
Feature Cards
Annotated Wireframes
Primary Users:
Executives
Managers
Employees
Stakeholder Interview
The In’s and Out’s
To start off this project and understand more about what Culture Booster was, my group and I sat in an interview with the founder and CEO of Culture Booster to gain a little more familiarity with it. I’ve never used a specific software program geared toward workers to increase engagement before so I went head-first into this interview not truly understanding what it offered.
To my pleasant surprise, I was really intrigued by the idea and the stakeholder’s vision.
The stakeholder gave us a lot of information and context surrounding the in’s and out’s of what Culture Booster was. More specifically, he mentioned two new features that he wanted to implement in to the software: Stars and Suggestions.
Stars - This feature’s main purpose is to serve as a recognition tool that can be used by anyone within the organization to send praise to workers and get recognized for their handwork and dedication. The overall goal is to make sure the recognition “sticks” to whoever receives it, in other words make sure the praise resonates with them and give them more positive reinforcement to continue doing a great job. The stars is measured as follows: Situation, Task, Approach, Result.
Suggestions - The suggestions feature is a welcoming way to encourage employee ideas and participation. Its main purpose is to give employees a voice and a chance to give their colleagues a reason to love their work not only take break but also redirect from a stoic, monotonous work environment. The founder sees this as a simple, guided composite that is largely democratized by employees and management.
With this information, I was able to get a clear understanding and visualization of what could be born from this. However, I had to analyze Culture Booster first in order to understand what other employee engagement strategies could also be applied to it.
Competitive Audit
Culture Booster vs. Competitors
The first research method my group and I performed before creating any wireframes was a competitive audit. This step was essential to understand what Culture Booster offered compared to what they didn’t thus helped us figure out what were some aspects that could be potential design features.
There were five other programs that Culture Booster was compared to and all the findings were synthesized into eight categories:
1: Recognition 5: Employee Feedback
2: Incentives 6: Analytics
3: Social 7: Meetings - 1:1’s
4: Goal Setting 8: Software Integration
The audit determined that Culture Booster didn’t have an incentives features nor software integrations where they can transfer user information into the software to eliminate other external platforms such as Microsoft Outlook or Teams.
User Journey Map
The Current Journey
In the photo below, I created a user journey map of a persona, Makayla (K for short), that had been feeling a little burnt out from a repetitive work life that was devoid of fun, creative activities. She wanted to pitch an idea to her manager to increase work relationships and to boost morale within the department.
This was created from the scenario:
Employees want to use Culture Booster to submit ideas and suggestions.
This journey map reflected the current state of the user without the goals (suggestions) envisioned by the founder. Per the persona’s journey of not currently having the option to pitch an idea, the map was based purely on emotions, thought process, and actions that could be forged from not having such a system. Without a system already enforced, it was what informed my feature proposals that captured a system for suggestions and community engagement.
The Drawing Board
Feature Concepts
Based on the CEO’s vision of the suggestions feature and the results from the current state of the journey map, I created five features - three suggestions features that could be easily applied to the user journey and two new feature concepts to generate community morale and relationship building. The features are as follows:
Development points: 8
Development points: 4
Development points: 5
Development points: 4
Development points: 6
Tech Scoping & Voting
After finishing my feature cards, I added them to a Figjam board that was created to gather all 87 feature cards that were produced to scope with the CEO and developer of Culture Booster.
The features were first synthesized into common themes and then analyzed by the developer by a point system.
One point = One day of work.
The point system helped me by deciding which feature I could later produce as I was only given a development budget of 20 points.
Once tech scoping was done by the developer, it was time to vote on which features we thought were the most important to design. My group used a dot voting system to single out the important features that were critical to the client’s vision.
When voting, my decision mechanism was by scoping out the features that held the most importance in terms of employee mental health and guidance. It was important to me that users were receiving the best features that would give them a voice and reassurance of adequacy.
The features that were voted in were as follows:
Features Satisfaction Rate
Kano Analysis
After the feature cards were all chosen, it was then sent out as a survey to seven research participants that rated it by:
1: How would you feel if this feature was present? (Like, Expect, Neutral, Tolerate, Dislike)
2: How would you feel if this feature was absent? (Like, Expect, Neutral, Tolerate, Dislike)
3: How important is it to you that this feature is present? (On a scale of 1 to 7, 7 being most important)
4: Additional comments (To get a little context as to why)
Once received back from the participants, my group and I started measuring the satisfaction rate of each feature by plotting the it on the Kano evaluation table. My teammates read the feedback to me while I used a sticky note to plot it on the drawn table on the whiteboard we were using.
Each feature was measured by:
1: Questionable: Conflicting responses of the feature
2: Reverse: Dislikes the functional version and likes the dysfunctional version
3: Performance: like having them and dislike not having
4: Must-be: Dislikes not having them
5: Attractive: Likes having a feature that’s not expected
6: Indifferent: Neutral feelings toward a feature
This step was really efficient in helping me decide which features were the most needed. However, I did have some uncertainty surrounding it as I didn’t initially understand the correlation of the Kano analysis to the features that I wanted to wireframe. But once I really deep-dived into more details of the method, I had a good sense of what I wanted to do.
This was a fun, collaborative activity to visually see the measure of importance to users.
Choosing Features
Annotated Wireframing
After the Kano analysis, I went ahead and started on a few designs within the development budget. This portion of the project was probably my favorite since I was able to flesh out the wireframes to it’s highest fidelity per my own vision. I definitely wanted to focus more on the suggestions features as it fell into the persona journey map that I created thus show the change in how a user would feel within that small process.
It was hard at first since I had to create them off rough sketches that some of my team mate’s sketched however, I was able to put my own flair into them which was what I enjoyed most about it. So then I decided on the features:
1: Suggestions Library - 8 dev. points (the area of which suggestions are located if they don’t get passed).
2: Suggestions dashboard - 3 (the suggestions landing page to submit and vote for ideas).
3: Visual voting page - 5 (a page showing the visual progress of submitted votes).
4: A submission form - 4 (a form that users can submit their suggestions).
Below are the designs that were inspired by my own and my teammate’s designs.
User Journey Map
The Future Journey
The proposed features that I designed then gave me a good sense of how they would fall into the user’s future journey as opposed to before.
I decided to change the future journey map from the previous one because it became cluttered with information. The split journey toward the end of the map was an indication showing the feelings a user might feel after not getting their suggestion passed however, it doesn’t limit the user from submitting another suggestion again.
Conclusion
Next Steps
Going forward, what next step I would’ve taken with Culture Booster was to add an additional feature of the Suggestions Reply from Management. Although it didn’t fit into the development budget that was set for me, I thought this feature would’ve been beneficial to add as another part of the suggestions. The stakeholder mentioned transparency between management and employees and this reply feature would’ve been a great visualization of how it could be implemented into their software.
I would also conduct research with these designs in a usability test to further find any pain points that could arise in order to shift the designs accordingly to provide a better experience.
Final Thoughts
The biggest takeaway from designing this week was the long and hard labor that it would take for a developer to develop all of these proposed designs. It’s important to remain empathetic and remember that what I think to be small could end up being a whole week to a month’s of back-end work for a developer. Designing could be very simple for one and burdensome for others. From that, I’ve found a much larger appreciation for all the time developers take to create great experiences for people.