Company well-being and engagement dashboard
Summary
Our customers, HR executives, found our legacy dashboard confusing, and they had a hard time justifying the cost to their leadership teams. By understanding our customers’ goals, we redesigned the dashboard to focus on the metrics they need to help them demonstrate the value of investing in employee well-being.
Role
Lead product designer
Team
1 designer (me), 1 product manager, 1 tech lead, 2 engineers
Timeframe
April 2023–December 2023
A little background
Companies have a hard time staying competitive to attract and retain top talent. One way companies stand out is by focusing on employee well-being and preventing burnout.
Using behavior change methodologies backed by science, the Thrive platform supports positive, long-term behavior change by meeting employees in their flow of work.
Business problem
Heavy strain on Customer Success Managers
The business lacked quantifiable long-term impact and relied heavily on sales tactics.
Our buyers, Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs), hesitated to renew contracts.
Our dashboards were out of sync
The admin dashboard didn't show aggregated data from the employee-level dashboard.
This made it difficult to accurately assess employee engagement.
Confusing UI
The UI was confusing for customers and didn't clearly show how Thrive's platform was helping them.
Thrive's initial dashboard was hastily assembled by a team that departed soon after its completion.
Goal: create self-service insights
We needed to create a self-service dashboard that would not only provide valuable insights but ease the burden on our Customer Success team by making the dashboard self-service and reducing ad hoc requests.
Deep dive into my process
Understanding user pain points
The first HR dashboard was quickly built by another team that abruptly left the company, leaving customers with a half-baked product.
I worked closely with our Customer Success team, and used them as proxies for our users. They were enthusiastic and were invested in the success of this new project.
I set up interviews with them to learn about their pain points with the current dashboard.
Top concerns
What content are employees engaging with?
Charts are hard to understand
How are we defining terms like burnout and engagement?
Uncovering the most important datapoints
Each quarter our customers meet with our Customer Success team to learn how Thrive is benefiting their people.
I reviewed past customer calls to identify areas where customers needed more clarification, faced challenges, or showed interest.
Through this work, I discovered that CSMs spent half of the time in these review explaining how to interpret the dashboard.
If we could house more usage and engagement data in the dashboard, it could lead to huge time savings for our customers and internal teams alike.
Cross-functional collaboration
Then, I collaborated with my PM to identify and collect each customer’s goals and internal KPIs associated with purchasing Thrive.
This helped uncover datapoints we would display through the dashboard. We learned that we weren’t fully addressing a key customer need: user engagement.
Creating a shared vision for our users
I set up workshops between my team and the Customer Success team to collect our learnings about our users. Personas aren’t always the answer, but they were needed to establish a shared vision of who our customer is and how we can help them.
Using these personas, doing UX research activities, and consulting with Thrive leadership, we discovered something new. Companies renewed subscriptions not only when they see improved well--being, but also when they see increases in usage + engagement.
We learned a crucial insight: If we can show HR leaders how their employees engage with Thrive, we can ease the burden on our CSMs and makes it easier for HR leaders to convince their CEO that Thrive is a worthwhile investment.
Rank ordering of key datapoints
In order to understand the importance of various datapoints on the dashboard, I used insights from customer calls, and ran card sorting exercises with CSMs. Patterns emerged and it was clear which information resonated most across clients.
With this understanding of a priority order, we could create a solution that met user goals and their business objectives. Then, I worked with my product team to arranged these datapoints according to impact / feasibility.
Ideation: to go far, go together
Taking a super collaborative approach, I involved product and engineering at every turn.
To get the ball rolling, I created lofi wireframes to expedite the process, show progress, and keep all stakeholders informed of ongoing work, gathering feedback along the way.
Ultimately I had to make two distinct designs—the MVP and final versions—based on constraints and phasing.
Design updates
A select few of the design updates that had the biggest impact to the user experience
Clarifying ambiguous terminology
Along the way, our product vision shifted to align with industry trends: from addressing burnout to improving overall well-being.
At first, customers were confused by ambiguous terms such as burnout and engagement levels. We didn’t have consistent internal definitions, so our CSMs played a vital role in tailoring our product to each customer.
To ease the burden on our CSMs and make the dashboard easier to understand, we replaced terms like "highly engaged" and "at risk of burnout".
(Plus, we were making quite the leap—negative responses could be because of a bad day, not because someone’s at risk for burnout.)
Instead we labeled the cohorts using more objective terms: positive and negative responses.
Engagement vs. well-being
There was much discussion about whether we should lead with well-being or engagement on the first page of our dashboard.
We wanted to build one version of the dashboard for all users, but our clients had different needs based on their company cultures.
I created both versions of the dashboard, along with a third that combined the top-level metrics from each view.
After getting feedback from CSMs, 82% preferred the combined version.
Working within technical constraints
I worked with my Eng team and UX Eng team to ensure we stayed within the constraints of Nivo Charts and Material UI.
This ensured we’d be able to build quickly by aligning with our charting library and our design system.
Creating a data viz library
I was developing our first real product for a new user group, and since our design system didn’t have chart components yet, I crafted a data viz system for the team.
Creating this component library allowed for easy editing throughout the process and enabled other teams to use these components in their product areas.
Designing with real data
As I prototyped using real customer data, I noticed that employee well-being levels usually look similar to what’s considered normal. This made it challenging to assess well-being levels compared to the benchmark.
I designed a new chart view that makes the comparison easier and provides a clear understanding of relative ratings.
Delivering metrics that matter
From research, we learned monthly active users over time was customers’ #1 request.
A combined view of engagement metrics + well-being benchmarks help HR executives prove the value of Thrive to company leadership.
Exploring employee engagement
HR leaders looking for usage and engagement can access these metrics through a dedicated page. This page provides detailed reporting on our flagship features and our most popular content across our platform.
Understanding dimensions of well-being
HR leaders striving to foster a positive workplace can learn how their employees report their well-being across various dimensions. This includes understanding which dimensions we use and how we measure their responses.
Business results
Thrive Global is the all-in-one product suite for improving employee well-being.
Product repositioning
600 hours per year
Anticipated time savings for CSMs due to reduced data requests and explanations
A self-serve dashboard means HR leaders no longer need to rely on CSMs for data requests
Showing the right metrics helps users justify the cost, prove ROI, and renew contracts
The positive impacts of behavior change
Our dashboard helps HR leaders understand when their people report lower well-being than the benchmark, so they can intervene and help people like Jessie, a Walmart employee.
Since using Thrive, Jessie has lost 30 pounds, and adopted healthier habits like eliminating fast food and getting more sleep.
At the end of the day it’s rewarding to see the real impact we have on people.
“I feel hopeful now. I feel sincerely happy — I’m learning to live and enjoy life.”
