Softway
INTRO
Softway is a digital transformation agency based in Houston, Texas. Their mission is to bring humanity to the workplace. They have a sub-brand called Culture Plus, which they use to help companies achieve high-performance and high-reliability cultures that win in the marketplace.
They have 4 products in their product suite to help them achieve this mission: Seneca Leaders, Seneca Go, Culture+ Bridge and Culture+ Counter.
My role was to work on Culture+ Counter, and build the user experience for it from scratch.
PROBLEM
In 2020, the COVID-19 lockdowns took a toll on companies' culture. Remote work disrupted traditional workplace dynamics, hindering social connections and spontaneous interactions. The absence of physical proximity made it challenging to foster team spirit and a sense of belonging among employees.
Softway launched 4 products in 2020 that played a pivotal role in building a strong team culture and fostering overall success. These products were designed to address the challenges posed by remote work, declining work culture and lacking leadership, and to enhance inclusivity, resilience, and success. Here’s how:
Seneca Leaders: Training experiences that help individuals and leaders become more self-aware and effective for their teams, departments, and company.
Seneca Go: A digital coaching app aimed at helping leaders grow good intentions into high-performing habits—and eventually, a better culture for all.
Culture+ Bridge: A self-paced DEI (diversity, equity, inclusivity) learning platform that aimed to build high-performing teams and inclusive workplace cultures.
Culture+ Counter: An NPS-based measurement tool to track cultural impact of the above tools in the org and help drive business outcomes. For the first time, you could tangibly attribute culture to business performance.
I was tasked with designing the Culture+ Counter experience from scratch, and because I was the sole designer and our design team was small, we worked on this product in smaller phases. This case study aims to cover Phase 1 of the product, where I had to kick off the research and build the foundations of the product. For brevity reasons, future phases are not covered in this case study.
OBJECTIVES
We wanted to enable leaders:
To tangibly measure how successful culture-related changes in their org are.
To see actionable insights into their org’s culture.
To maximise their efforts in culture change using key behaviour metrics.
OPPORTUNITIES
“Okay, Softway is helping us better our culture, but how do know or measure the ROI of our efforts?” was a frequent question from leaders of other orgs that we spoke to. Any culture efforts that leaders made in their org to better their culture needed to be measured. This was a big reason we decided to start Culture+ Counter. We had the chance to strengthen our Culture+ product suite by building Culture+ Counter and establish ourselves as a leading Culture-as-a-Service agency.
We had the opportunity to utilise the NPS model, a widely-accepted standard, to show results to leaders that they could utilise for actionable insights.
We also took this product as an opportunity to see how Culture+ Counter would enhance our existing product suite of Seneca Leaders, Seneca Go and Culture+ Bridge.
LOCATION
Houston, TX, USA
TIMELINE
Phase 1: 2 months
SKILLS & TOOLS
UX Research
UX Design
UI Design
Data Visualisation
Figma
Research
USER INTERVIEWS
Culture+ Counter was a tool that we wanted to use internally as well as provide it to clients. Our primary user was an executive-level HR member and our secondary user was a C-level executive. These folks would use Culture+ Counter to see and measure the impact and ROI of the culture changes that were made in the org as a result of the other Culture+ products we offered. The good news for us was that we had our target users right in our very org—and they provided great inputs for Culture+ Counter.
We couldn’t venture out just yet and interview folks in these positions from other companies, so we held internal user interviews to answer these questions:
What aspects of work culture do we want to measure?
What metrics are most important to measure ROI of cultural changes?
How do we currently measure or get a pulse of our work culture?
Over the course of 7 user interviews with leaders and HR executives in our company, I learned a lot about the user and the problem. Here’s the affinity map I came up with:
AFFINITY MAP
FINDINGS
Here are the findings from the above affinity map:
DESK RESEARCH
Given the nature of the problem that the Culture+ Counter product was solving, it was destined to have a dashboard. I took a look at some research papers from ResearchGate to understand the general usage, nature and types of dashboards better.
One research paper from Artem Kruglov, Giancarlo Succi and Idel Ishbaev provided some fantastic insights. It showcased the types of dashboards with regards to functionality, users, and usage:
Our dashboard for Culture+ Counter had to be a strategic dashboard, since we were targeting executives at the top level.
From the research paper, I also learned about visual and functional features of a dashboard:
This was helpful to know as it would inform our initial wireframes for our Culture+ Counter dashboard when we got to that step of the process.
Define
USER PERSONA
Since we already had people in the roles of our ideal user, it was easy to draw up a user persona:
USER JOURNEY MAP
We asked ourselves, “What would our ideal user journey look like?”
Here’s what I drew up:
INSIGHTS
We knew that the initial set up for data collection would be time-consuming, but this would only be needed the first time Culture+ Counter is set up.
While the data analysis may produce negative aspects of the work culture that the org needs to change, it provides it in the form of actionable insights so that it is constructive.
With the ideal user being in HR, it was important to focus on exporting reports so that they could be shared with C-level executives for bigger impact.
So finally, we zeroed in on the challenge at hand:
“How might we enable leaders to effectively measure and demonstrate the ROI of culture change in their organization, while providing actionable insights to drive continuous improvement and maximize their efforts in culture change?”
Ideate
ASPECTS OF WORK CULTURE
To standardize the units of measurement, we brainstormed which aspects of work culture to measure. Here’s what we came up with:
Mindset
Inclusion
Empathy
Trust
Attitude
Communication
Empowerment
Vulnerability
Forgiveness
Teamwork
Efficiency
Innovation
We also decided to categorize these work aspects into broader categories so that we could classify the aspects that belong together, hence making our dashboard design, actionable insights and reports easier to comprehend.
METRICS TO MEASURE
While there were many metrics that we could measure, we chose to primarily use NPS owing to how efficient it was. It was also underutilized for work culture, as companies mostly used it for customer feedback.
Some other metrics we chose to use were:
Employee Retention Rate
Project Completion Rates
Leadership Effectiveness Assessments
METHODS OF MEASURING
Current methods of measuring metrics, like performance reviews, 1-1 feedback sessions and exit interviews either helped the org too late, or not at all. The other issue with 1-1 feedback sessions was that most employees weren’t comfortable sharing their thoughts with their manager about leadership and the current state of the org.
To provide the required sense of security and comfort, we chose to use employee surveys to collect our NPS data for Culture+ Counter. This data would be visible to HR, but not to the manager. This way, the NPS data was independent of the 1-1 feedback sessions or the performance reviews.
However, we didn’t completely disregard 1-1 feedback sessions and performance reviews. We decided to use them in tandem with employee surveys to get to what we wanted to achieve.
Prototype
COMPONENTS
It was crucial to design this dashboard using Softway’s design system. But this also meant that I’d be creating new components for the dashboard’s data visuals. Some key business decisions that went into the design:
Each Work Aspect would have a score that was measured using a proprietary formula that utilized:
NPS (via employee surveys)
Employee Retention Rate
Project Completion Rates
Leadership Effectiveness Assessments
1-1 Feedback Sessions
Performance Reviews
We would also need to show the overall company score that was calculated using a proprietary formula that included the scores from the work aspects.
Business objectives weren’t to be neglected. We had to include the KPIs for these along with the month-on-month change.
Applying the principles of Atomic Design, I designed some options for the data visual components, while pulling information from my desk research about different dashboard types:
I gathered feedback on these components to reiterate on some minor changes. This approach helped us visualize each individual data point before I designed the dashboard UI.
ROUND 1
Using these components, I designed the two options for the dashboard UI keeping in mind the need to address the target user’s three main pain points:
Option 1: The Safe One
This option had the metrics for the Business Objectives up. These metrics would be measured using KPIs, and compared month-on-month. A horizontal bar chart is used here, since all the Business Objectives are nominal variables.
I also displayed the Company Score in a radar-like design, along with insights that could help improve it.
The NPS for the Work Aspects are shown, along with an overall total for each work aspect category and the number of respondents. Lighter and darker colors distinguish the NPS in these Work Aspects.
Option 2: The Fancy One
I used a hexagonal chart to show the Business Objectives up front, because this would help us look for patterns of change in our business objectives month-on-month.
The Company Score and Insights section is placed right below the Business Objectives section, and from here, the design takes an interesting turn: The Company Score connects to other work aspects in a linear format to showcase the fact that Behavior influenced Culture of Love, which influenced Resilience & Belonging, which eventually influenced the Company Score.
The Work Aspects themselves are represented in a circular diagram, with their NPS being distinguished by lighter and darker colors.
ROUND 2
I gathered feedback on these two design options, and here are the changes I made based on the feedback:
Option 1: The Safe One
We wanted to explore an option where we showed the current score vs the baseline score (the initial score).
We also wanted to show an alert status for scores that were very low, so that stakeholders could notice these scores and work on them.
We spoke about tweaking the color palette for some of the components and using a different set of colors from our design system.
Option 2: The Fancy One
We found that some of our target users associated speedometer charts closely with NPS. So I added them to show the scores in order to give our target users that sense of familiarity.
While the linear series of the circular diagrams worked in telling the story, we wanted to reverse the order of the sections to showcase the impact of each section on the following section better. This would mean placing the Business Objectives section last, and placing the Work Aspects first.
We also decided to add a line about how each section impacted the following section.
We replaced the vertical bar chart for the Attribute scores with the horizontal stacked bar chart. This allowed us to show the 3 types of NPS: Promoters, Passive and Detractors.
FINAL DESIGN
This project brought us into unchartered territory. No one had made a dashboard that measured work culture change, at that point in time. So we knew that we had to reiterate quite a bit on this design.
Here was the feedback and direction I got from our leadership team, who were our ideal users, and the design team, to move forward from these two design options:
“The target user has to scroll quite a bit to get to the other sections.”
“The colors call too much attention on the homepage. Let’s make them more subtle.”
“A mix between Option 1 and Option 2 would be ideal.”
“We can weed out some of the details, like number of participants and showing the ratio of Promotors, Passive and Detractors.”
“Let’s show some of the Insights along with the Company Score.”
We had an internal review and brainstorming session to trim down some of the details we were showing on our dashboard.
Here’s the final homepage design, along with the design for the Behavior details page:
Some key design decisions in the final design:
Colors are used sparingly, so that they still convey the NPS data, but in a way that’s very distracting.
Colors are used to signify if an Attribute’s NPS is Excellent, Great, Good or Needs Improvement.
Insights are provided to each Work Aspect, with the option to dive into details.
Company Score section highlights successful areas, along with Insights and a details CTA so that the user can take action.
Business Objectives clearly mention the KPI, Unit, month-on-month comparison and percentage changes.
Upon entering the details page of the Behavior work aspect, you can filter data by Department, Levels, Tenure and Location.
On this page, you can also see NPS data categorized into Excellent, Great, Good and Needs Improvement, along with Insights and a Trend Analysis for Behavior. You can also see the Trend Analysis for all Attributes inside Behavior, as well as seeing the NPS types for each department.
Here’s how we solved our target user’s pain points with the final prototype:
Work Culture Aspects: We measured various aspects of work culture, while demonstrating how they each impacted one another.
Standardized Measures: We used NPS as a standard measure, and designed around it, keeping in mind all its features and limitations. This creates a sense of familiarity for the user.
Actionable Insights: We were able to provide insights that our target user could look at and identify areas in the org that they need to make cultural changes.
Impact on Business: Leaders have a hard time seeing how work culture impacts their business outcomes. With our Culture+ Counter dashboard, we were able to demonstrate the business impact based on work culture metrics.
This concludes Phase 1 of this project.
Test
We successfully developed the initial prototype with our exceptional team of developers, and our dedicated sales team presented this groundbreaking product alongside our comprehensive suite of offerings. As a result, we acquired an impressive roster of clients, including:
Google
Nuro
Genesys Works
Groupon
Feedback from the leadership team, a.k.a. our early internal users:
Conclusion
LESSONS LEARNED
I learned quite a lot about dashboard design: types of dashboards, usage instances of different types of charts for data visualizations, NPS, and a lot more.
As a team, we learned how enterprise-level clients deal with work culture changes and how work culture impacts business objectives in an org.
After Phase 1, we learned to work more efficiently and in an agile manner, resulting in fewer design iterations and a quicker path to our final design.
NEXT STEPS
While this page only covers Phase 1 of this project, for Phase 2, we planned to work on exporting the results in a shareable format for C-level executives + more features and pages to solve new user pains that we discovered along the way.
FINAL NOTE
Embarking on this project was a thrilling journey that took me into uncharted territory. I am immensely thankful to Softway for providing me with the opportunity to be a part of it. I am particularly delighted by the invaluable support and guidance I received from the Chief Design Officer during that time, which greatly contributed to my growth and development.
