WorkStep

Designing a Comprehensive Survey Creation Tool for Enterprise Customers.

WorkStep provides a powerful continuous listening tool that utilizes ready-made surveys designed specifically to help engage and retain the frontline workforce of some of the largest enterprise companies including Pepsico, NFI and more.

Team

Product Manager, Engineering Lead, 2 Developers

My Role

Pod Lead / Senior Product Designer

Duration

3 Months

Industry

HCM / HRM

Challenge

WorkStep only provided prebuilt surveys. However, in the competitive landscape of employee engagement, our clients needed and expected the ability to gather insights from their frontline workforce independently.

How might we provide a survey creation platform that would enable HR departments and managers to easily create, customize, and deploy all surveys?

Results

The new survey creation tool was successfully launched and received positive feedback from our enterprise customers.

8/10

User Satisfaction

99%

Reduction in internal service requests

8+

New surveys created

2

New sales conversions

Old View

Lacked the ability to create, view, and customize individual surveys.

Constraints

Time Constraint: Expectations were high from customers from their experience with previous solutions, however we needed to prioritize core functionalities over nice-to-have features to meet the deadline.

Technical Debt: Instead of building on top of legacy code, which was overly complex and would need refactoring, we chose to build from scratch so that we could build and scale faster.

Limited Team Size: We had a relatively small engineering team including a junior engineer so we needed to plan for slower development and the likelihood of bugs.

User Research & Feedback Constraint: While we had direct access to HR admins, Managers were more likely to create surveys but meeting with them wasn’t feasible so we needed to keep the design universal and simple.

01
Discover
Qualitative and quantitive research along with competitive analysis is critical for understanding project context: the market it’s competing in, the users it will serve, and the business goals it should fulfill.
Define
Analyze and synthesize discovery data to form insights that identify the scope and objectives of the project and lay a fundamental foundation for Design Synthesis in the development step.
02
Develop
Sketching, wireframing, and prototyping solutions to test and validate design concepts, and collaboratively analyze how designs will inform behavior and effect the experience of the user.
03
Deliver
Collaborating with engineers to ensure designs are implemented accurately. This involves preparing assets and documentation and design reviews to iterate as needed and maintain consistency.
04

01

Discover

Qualitative and quantitive research along with competitive analysis is critical for understanding project context: the market it’s competing in, the users it will serve, and the business goals it should fulfill.

Develop

Sketching, wireframing, and prototyping solutions to test and validate design concepts, and collaboratively analyze how designs will inform behavior and effect the experience of the user.

03

Define

Analyze and synthesize discovery data to form insights that identify the scope and objectives of the project and lay a fundamental foundation for Design Synthesis in the development step.

02

Deliver

Collaborating with engineers to ensure designs are implemented accurately. This involves preparing assets and documentation and design reviews to iterate as needed and maintain consistency.

04

01
Discover
Qualitative and quantitive research along with competitive analysis is critical for understanding project context: the market it’s competing in, the users it will serve, and the business goals it should fulfill.
Define
Analyze and synthesize discovery data to form insights that identify the scope and objectives of the project and lay a fundamental foundation for Design Synthesis in the development step.
02
Develop
Sketching, wireframing, and prototyping solutions to test and validate design concepts, and collaboratively analyze how designs will inform behavior and effect the experience of the user.
03
Deliver
Collaborating with engineers to ensure designs are implemented accurately. This involves preparing assets and documentation and design reviews to iterate as needed and maintain consistency.
04

Discover

Qualitative: We conducted user interviews with our largest customers as well as our internal stakeholders, sales team, engineering, and customer success to understand pain points and requirements.

Quantitative: We sent surveys to our remaining customers and analyzed in-app analytics to confirm pain points and validate requirements.

“While the prebuilt surveys meet our overall employee engagement needs, often we like to send smaller surveys to follow up after we have taken action”

Stephanie

HR Administration

Competitive Analysis: We analyzed existing survey tools and industry trends in the market, noting their strengths and weaknesses. This helped us identify opportunities for differentiation, such as more advanced segmentation, simpler customization options, and the need to edit surveys after they went live.

Lattice

What we learned

It needs to be simple and intuitive for anyone to use

Customization is highly requested but rarley used

Targeted employee distribution is a must have

If employees will read it, then visibility is essential

Results Visibility

There is potential for huge internal wins

It needs to be simple and intuitive for anyone to use

Customization is highly requested but rarley used

Targeted employee distribution is a must have

If employees will read it, then visibility is essential

Results Visibility

There is potential for huge internal wins

It needs to be simple and intuitive for anyone to use

Customization is highly requested but rarley used

Targeted employee distribution is a must have

If employees will read it, then visibility is essential

Results Visibility

There is potential for huge internal wins

Define

Goals - Here’s the predicted outcome I was designing for:

• Simple Intuitive User Experience

• Advanced Segmentation

• Visibility of all customer communication

Key metrics - How we will measure our success:

• # of internal service requests

• Conversation rates for sales team

• # of surveys created

Develop

Ideation and wire framing: Collaborated with the product manager and engineering to outline the survey creation process. This involved brainstorming sessions to define the 5-step process, followed by sketching wireframes for each step:

Survey Setup: Define survey name, description, and permissions.
Question design: Add, duplicate, reorder, and remove questions, including open text, multiple choice, scale, and eNPS.
Invitation: Build employee segments using attributes and save segments for future use.
Message: Include rich text and email and SMS previews.
Reminders: Set survey open and close dates, and preview reminder cadence and messaging.
Confirmation: Custom message shown to employees after successfully completing a survey - needs to include rich text so customers can include additional links.
Review: Added as a way to increase confidence and trust by reviewing all settings before launching survey.

Prototyping: Using Figma, I created multiple interactive prototypes to simulate the user journey through the survey creation process. These prototypes were used for A/B usability testing with select users from our client base.

Usability Testing: Conducted multiple rounds of testing to refine the user interface and ensure a smooth user experience. Feedback from testing led to several iterations, including:

Addition of the ‘Review’ Step: Users often would take multiple weeks to complete survey setup and lacked confidence in what they had already completed.
Enhancing Question Editing: Users wanted to edit surveys after launch. Instead of preventing them from doing this because of the risks to data integrity, we came up with ways to help communicate the risks.
Improving Segmentation UI: We found that users wanted to use segments they had used before so we needed to give them a way to save and edit previously used segments.

Usability Testing: Conducted multiple rounds of testing to refine the user interface and ensure a smooth user experience. Feedback from testing led to several iterations, including:

Addition of the ‘Review’ Step: Users often would take multiple weeks to complete survey setup and lacked confidence in what they had already completed.
Enhancing Question Editing: Users wanted to edit surveys after launch. Instead of preventing them from doing this because of the risks to data integrity, we came up with ways to help communicate the risks.
Improving Segmentation UI: We found that users wanted to use segments they had used before so we needed to give them a way to save and edit previously used segments.

Usability Testing: Conducted multiple rounds of testing to refine the user interface and ensure a smooth user experience. Feedback from testing led to several iterations, including:

Addition of the ‘Review’ Step: Users often would take multiple weeks to complete survey setup and lacked confidence in what they had already completed.
Enhancing Question Editing: Users wanted to edit surveys after launch. Instead of preventing them from doing this because of the risks to data integrity, we came up with ways to help communicate the risks.
Improving Segmentation UI: We found that users wanted to use segments they had used before so we needed to give them a way to save and edit previously used segments.

This was a dynamic tool for selecting attributes of employees to build a segment. It included the ability to search attributes when more than 15 options existed, selecting, saving and editing segments, and deselecting all but one option in an attribute list.

Delivery

Implementation: I worked closely with the development team to ensure the design was implemented accurately. This involved reviewing newly built components, regular check-ins, and design reviews to address any challenges and maintain design integrity.

Outcome and Impact: The new survey creation tool was successfully launched and received positive feedback from our enterprise customers. Key outcomes included:

8/10

User Satisfaction

99%

Reduction in internal service requests

8+

New surveys created

2

New sales conversions

Conclusion

Reflection and Learning: This project was a valuable learning experience in balancing user needs with technical constraints. Key takeaways include:

Iterative Design: Regular testing and feedback loops are crucial for refining complex features.
User-Centric Approach: Deep understanding of user workflows leads to more effective solutions.
Collaboration: Close collaboration with cross-functional teams ensures successful implementation.

Next Steps: Based on user feedback, future enhancements could include:

Survey Templates: instead of ‘Having’ to build from scratch every time, templates can give them a head start.
Question Library: Offering a list of prebuilt survey questions that can be added to a survey.
Editable Reminders: While customers didn’t show a lot of interest in editing the reminder text, they often asked if they could.
Add limits on multiple choice. Customers want to be able to have employees only choose up to a certain number of options.