Reflektive Analytics
Background
Team
In 2020, I joined Reflektive as a full-time product designer. Our team included 1 other product designer, 4 PMs, and around 30 engineers.
My Role
When I joined, some of the Analytics functionality was already designed and built. My role was to finalize the experience, focusing on the interaction and visual design of features to include in our Beta release.
Problem
Are my employees happy?
HR teams use Reflektive's surveys, reviews, and goal setting to help measure employee happiness and engagement. The problem was this useful data had to be gathered from different pages – the data was siloed and difficult to analyze.
Users
HR Teams
To learn about HR team goals and needs, I interviewed some of our users. I also did market research and spoke to HR subject matter experts.
Learnings: HR Teams must oversee a wide range of functions, from recruiting, to compensation, to compliance, and more. They are generally pretty tech savvy, and highly attuned to compliance or privacy issues.
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Photo Credit: Anthony Shkaba from Pexels
Goals
Increase Monthly Active Users
Many users only signed in to Reflektive for their yearly Review cycles. Our goal was to build features that added value throughout the year, which should increase Monthly Active Users. We used Pendo to track this data.
Powerful yet Simple Design
We knew we could help HR teams better analyze and track employee happiness, but different HR teams often cared different data (Recognition sent, average Survey scores, Goals completed, etc.). Therefor, this tool needed to be completely customizable (which inherently increases complexity) but it also needed to be simple enough that HR teams could quickly see value in it.
Design
Outstanding Questions
The basic architecture for the Analytics functionality was already built when I arrived. Users would create Reports (data tables) which could be added to Dashboards. I needed to design things like:
☞ How do users manipulate and edit data tables?
☞ How do users create data visualizations?
☞ How do users share dashboards?
Jobs-to-be-Done
I worked with my PM to determine our users' jobs-to-be-done, in the format "I want to ____ , so I can ____ ." For example, "I want to filter the survey data, so I can see only the results for a particular Team / Manager / Location / Department".
Feature prioritization
I ran a feature prioritization exercise to help my team choose the most impactful features that could be built in time for the Beta release. Capabilities like Add Field (a new column to the data table), filtering, sorting, and grouping emerged as obvious features to include.
Mockups
I created multiple design solutions, which helped my team consider the implications of each design and make better decisions around what to build.
Testing
We decided to wait until the Beta release to test the product with users – showing prototypes with dummy data wouldn't be nearly as illuminating as testing with real data (and we were short on both time and designers).
Just before the Beta release, Reflektive was acquired by PeopleFluent. I never got to test these designs 🙁
Solutions
One goal was to make this tool simple for first time users. I designed templates with pre-built visualizations that would provide immediate value to new users.
HR Teams would need to customize these Reports using filtering, sorting, and grouping. These are common reporting features (found in tools like Salesforce and Airtable) that most users were likely to recognize.
The above functionality looks somewhat complex, so I used progressive disclosure to reveal form fields one at a time:
Users needed to revisit certain Reports over time – a good reason to include a Dashboard. I used hover states to give users access to more details, while keeping default visualizations clean and simple.
Once HR teams created a report / visualization, they needed to share it with the right people – certain teams or managers, just C-suite, or possibly all employees:
I designed too many features to discuss them all – here are a just a few more:
Figma Design System
I also streamlined our design process by creating time-saving Figma components. For example, this table component lets you add or subtract rows / columns instantly while maintaining each cell's spacing! I was inordinately proud of this 😆
