Problems
When I first joined the team, I showed my friends the product I was going to be working on. One of the comments I can’t get away from is “it looks like a poorly edited PDF document”. But it’s actually an app, a cloud-based web app. That’s how bad it was and what really excited me.
After getting my hands on a few small projects, I started working on redesigning the app itself. I started with the goal setting (JEP) tool, the core part of the app. The goal of the JEP tool is to help users manage their objectives. It’s like a variation of OKRs, but also different in many ways. I still remember the first time the team walked me through JEP. I was exhausted, it was like I was just taught how to send a rocket into space.
The original JEP creation process was way too long and complicated. It included six user input steps, two user review steps, and a few learning and sharing steps. The navigation was a disaster. The back button had different behaviours on different pages. And lacking feedbacks for basic user actions, because it was designed first for mobile, while the reality was more than 90% of users were using it on a desktop. It took me a few days to figure out what was going on over there and how to navigate within the app or go back and forth to edit something.
Our data showed that almost 50% of users weren’t able to make it through the JEP creation process. Users were not coming back after their initial interaction. I won’t even bother mentioning how many users didn’t come back after a week, a month, or a quarter. We were losing users, all the while the team was working very hard to get new users to the app. On top of that, we were struggling to get our paid users back.
At the same time, the team had decided to shift the product from coach-leader market to team market. We redefined our market fit. The product needed to be redesigned to accommodate that.
Goals
After we identified the problems we had our goals became very clear.
- Switch product from coach-leader market to team market.
- Redesign the desktop experience with mobile users in mind.
- Make it easier for the user to create a Job Effectiveness Plan.
- Get the users back to the app after the initial interaction, a week, a month, a quarter, and a year.
Exploration
As a small team with big goals in mind, we decided to take some baby steps to test some of our ideas first. So the first thing, which was also the most important, we worked on is how to make it easier for the user to create a JEP.
I could probably give you a huge list of issues we found about the JEP tool, but we had to start from somewhere, so I focused on making it easier for the user to navigate through the tool.
I mapped out how the navigation was working and redesigned the navigation structure. I changed how the navigation system works by building a status indicator and changed the language of the buttons.
The result wasn’t as great as I expected. There was only a roughly 7% increase compared to before redesigning the navigation system. But the JEP creation process was still unchanged and quite complicated. We decided to work on that next.
Talking with Stakeholders
Although the Emerson Suite as a software is only 3 years old, the methodology behind it has been used for more than 45 years and has proved to be an effective way to manage a team. So it was important to thoroughly understand the methodology by talking with the company founder, consultants who used this methodology before, as well as meeting with the product manager and the tech team to better understand how and why some decisions were made before.
In addition to that, I went to several new user onboarding sessions to see who the users were, how they used the app and received feedback from them. This leads us to the next step in the redesign.
User Interviews
A user interview is a primary way to get to know users. What are their goals? What do they use? What technology are they familiar with? Why do they need your product? What problem do they want to solve? User interviews can help you get answers to all these questions.
I found that having an interview guide will help a lot to direct the conversation to the issues you want to learn about. It helps you to better pose your questions and follow-ups, leading to better results. For someone new to user interviews, having a guide will also enable you to feel less nervous.
My goal for the interview was to get insights about our users and how they used our tools, especially their experience with the JEP tool. I conducted three in-person interviews and three phone interviews. The interviewees came from different industries and had different positions within the companies they represented.
Of course, some interviewees don’t really see the value of the tool, while the others had integrated the tool into their process and were hoping to get more value from it. In general, those that see value in the product usually give more helpful feedback and insight, while those that do not see value will be less fruitful.
Building Personas
After talking with stakeholders and users, along with reviewing the market fit, I built four personas. Collectively, they represented Leader Manager, Owner Operator, Product Buyer, and a Manager from the Asia market.
The Hook Model and User Journey Map
We were struggling to get the user back. To help the user make the most of our product, also to have them come back to the app more often, we applied the hook model to our app. This provided a great outline when we were mapping out the user journey.
I created the user journey map and went through a few review sessions with the team to refine it. It not only helped with building a user habit but also provided insights for marketing and sales.
Rethink JEP Creation Process
The original JEP creation process matched how it was being taught in the consulting world. The consultant met with the client, they started the process by coming up a list of outputs the client wanted to achieve, then worked on finding key metrics to measure outputs, and finally wrote objectives using the metrics defined previously.
That process was undebatable when a professional was there to support the client and the work was done on paper or an Excel form. But when it came to digital, one problem the user had is they constantly had to go back and forth to edit an input from previous steps, which also broke the natural thinking process.
But when it comes to the digital product, without the help of a consultant, it’s very difficult to think about a few outputs and objectives at the same time. The new JEP creation process allows users to focus on one thing at a time. They think of one output they want to achieve, define the metrics and objectives, then they move on to the next output if they have more.
After rethinking the JEP creation process, I built a prototype using InVision. We tested it with a few current users in their offices. All users did not have any issues completing the JEP creation process.
Through the test, we found out a few things:
- For adding a metric, users need to pick a category for the metric. A lot of times users found it was hard to pick a category. It was an obstacle for them. When I took that feedback to the team, I also learnt that picking a metric category was not part of the original methodology. It was added to help the users think of a metric. But in reality, users are thinking of objectives first, then they go back to fill out the metrics. There were even some users that put their objectives in the metric input box and put a number in the objective input box.
- For non-experienced users, they found it was hard to complete a JEP for the first time by themselves.
- Some terminologies and languages were confusing and were being translated differently by different users.
So after discussion with the team, we removed the metric category. Later tests showed positive feedback from users after removing that element from the process. We also tried to build in AI suggestions, based on the user’s role and industry, using our established 45 years worth of data. This was done to even further simplifier the process by assisting the user in creating their JEP. However, after an internal review, the AI feature fell out of scope after the team reprioritized the app design, and it was removed.
Design
I started the redesign with JEP card, which is the result of user’s input. The card will be viewed by the user for a year, the standard length of a JEP, so it was really important for me to get it right.
So here are the key takeaways from talking with the stakeholders and the user interviews:
- The original JEP card design was very confusing. It was hard for even experienced users to distinguish which are outputs, metrics, and objectives.
- When a user creates a JEP, one output could have multiple metrics and objectives. In the original design, a user could not establish connections between related objectives. The structure of the card was not aligned with the structure of a JEP or how the user reviewed their JEP. It took too much effort for the user to see the whole picture.
- In the consulting way, JEP is an Excel list. Users are familiar with that format.
- Users didn’t know how to edit and add a JEP item.
- Users didn’t know how to add a JEP item.
- The original design didn’t support multiple JEP instances.
In the original design, each page only showed one objective. If the same output had multiple objectives, the user needed to click through a few pages to see them one by one.
In the redesign, to make it as easy as possible for the user to understand their JEP at a glance, I added labels to each area and used different positioning and visual treatments to distinguish them. Then I put metrics and objectives, that related to the same outputs, together. This resulted in the user being able to see the full picture of a JEP item at a glance.
A lot of our users used the JEP tool before when it was not transformed into a digital product. They could easily understand their objectives just by having a glance at the Excel file they made. The original digital design broke the whole thing into several pages, thus, connections were drastically weakened.
In the redesign, objectives for the same outputs are displayed in one card, and all cards are being seen on the same page without too much effort. Also, we provided the list view option, so those who got used to the tradition Excel view can adapt to the app quickly.
Results
The JEP redesign was the first step for us to enter into the team performance management market.
It established new visual styles and UX patterns that will be used on our other products.
Since the first version of the JEP was released, the JEP activities have demonstrated a 61% increase.
What I Learnt
From the beginning of the project to the development team released the first version of the redesigned JEP tool, took about 4 months in total. Here are the most important things I learnt during this process.
Pause a little bit, once a while, to do some design exploration. It will give you long-term views on your product. The initial exploration I did didn’t make a huge difference to the product, but both I and the team gained a great deal of valuable insight from it. Many features we came up with in the later redesign, have either come from the initial exploration or have been inspired by it. I don’t regret the work we did at all.
The other thing I learnt is to design a few steps further. Working at a startup, the resources are limited. Your development team will probably have to implement the design in a few phases. But by examining your product roadmap, backlog, stakeholder and user interview feedback, it enables you to design a step or two further and allows the development team to leave space for the advanced features you have in mind.
Both learning outcomes have served my current projects, immensely. I look forward to learning more!
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