My Role: iOS Mobile Product Designer

Team: 3 Product Designers, 3 Developers, 1 Visual Designer

Duration: 20 Weeks

Software Tools: Sketch, Illustrator, Keynote, inVision

The Challenge: Koé is a communication platform helping companies monitor, build and maintain a healthy organizational culture. As an alternative to employees engagement survey, Koé aimed to enable ongoing open communication between employees and managers. Employees’ motivation to use this service is a huge barrier and the critical success factor for the product market traction.

The Goal: Redesign Koé mobile app to make it engaging and efficient for employee - manager communication.

Responsibilities

My primary responsibility was to develop the Concept Design that adhered to iOS Guidelines for the Koé iOS app. I do so by doing the following:

• Design facilitation
• User Interviews
• Applied behavioral economics to product design
• Led user research analysis and synthesis sessions
• Wireframes, prototyping and usability testing for the redesigned iOS App

Interviews

Altogether we talked to 12 people working in a wide spectrum of companies from Google to non-profits and we compared insights with published Gallup research data on employees’ engagement.

In our interviews, we found that employees feel upset when their company doesn’t consider their concerns a priority, or when promises are false, broken, or delayed. Our conclusions were confirmed by managers and human resources professionals whom we interviewed afterward.

After gathering the raw information from both user groups, we employed various UX research methods (shown below) to make sense of the feedback we had collected. From there we were able to define our problem statement.

Discovery:

Employees are not sharing their feedback with companies because they feel their efforts will be in vain.

Hypothesis:

As employees share their sentiments, Koé helps leaders to sort and aggregate data by similar feelings and keep employees and management in the loop about what is being done.

Vision:

Using IBM’s Watson (or similar natural language processing technology), Koé communication platform will enable managers to spot organization trends, find out what can go awry, and keep track of actions taken.

Ideation

With our insights we discovered during our research, we defined the features that would address employee needs to be recognized, heard, and to ensure that promises made by Employers would be kept. We were confident that without those key elements user's would not engage with the mobile application. 

We developed user flows, feature analysis to prioritize what would be our core feature sets, maintained that Employees could communicate with everyone within company to foster stronger peer-to-peer communication, made sure there was a unique experience for Employees when they communicated with managers, and sketched out our ideas to share with the larger team. After collaborating with the stakeholders, developers, and other designers we began building the user interfaces that would ultimately be used in the final app.