What is the app about?

This application encourages employees to define personalised career paths, objectives and help them progress via continuous feedback from their managers on their performance and attributes.

Business Objectives

• Revamp the existing appraisal process and the legacy application into a user friendly, intuitive, modern, responsive application.
• Create a conversational, transparent culture among the associates and managers and eliminate bias.
• Empower employees to define their desired career paths, objectives and equip them with the tool to obtain continuous feedback on their goals.
• Align the system with the strategic organisational initiatives and create a foundation to integrate relevant modules seamlessly.

Scope of the app

• Ability to automatically initiate appraisals for all employees at the beginning of each FY.
• Robust workflows for the different application roles and the ability to seamlessly switch between them as required.
• Intuitive, well-designed system to define objectives, characteristics and capture feedback.
• Ability to create templates and define objectives for multiple employees at the same time.
• Ability to evaluate and review all the objectives
• A robust notification system that keeps users apprised of all the critical system changes.
• A detailed dashboard to view metrics and download appraisal reports for HR, Unit Heads and Leadership.
• Ability to remind people to encourage continuous feedback and appraisal progress.
• Efficient and well-designed hybrid mobile app for quicker real-time feedback and conversations.

The existing evaluation process

The Evaluator sets objectives for the Appraisee.

Before the evaluation deadline, the Appraisee responds to each of the objectives and submits the goal sheet for evaluation. The goal sheet will be evaluated by the Evaluator, who will award a rank based on the Appraisee’s performance across each objective based on which a Performance score will be generated.

The goal sheet will be then shared with the reviewer to verify the evaluation. Post the reviewer's approval, the performance score will be then shared with the Appraisee. Post the goal sheet submission, the Appraisee will only be able to view the progress of the goal sheet at each stage but cannot perform any actions.

Kick-Off

I was onboarded onto this project by January 2018. By then, the project had already started and a good 2-3 months have progressed. The entire project team was spread out between Chennai, Mumbai, and Delhi.

The progress that had been made till then was neatly documented and was shared with me by the Business Analyst to bring me up to speed. I took nearly a week to get up to speed and scheduled regular calls with the team to clarify any queries that I had.

My Role

I led the end-to-end design for this entire project. I did collaborate with senior design consultants and visual designers for design reviews and feedback. The project teams comprise of:

• 5 Backend Developers
• 3 Frontend Developers
• 3 Business Analysts
• 2 Product Managers
• 1 UX Designer (Yes. This is Me! 😄)

The application was built using ReactJS and Java. I started the project in Sketch but later migrated to Figma.

How we began

At the beginning of 2017, a group of HR Managers and the Appraise Application team were tasked with revamping the current appraisal process.

The designers and BA from the application team conducted multiple user interviews and focus group sessions for more than a month and came up with user requirements and personas.

Around May 2017, due to certain unforeseen circumstances the project was temporarily shelved and was planned to restart back in a couple of months.

The project was restarted back in December 2017 and I was roped in January to lead the design and collaborate with the Application team in revamping the product.

Research & Analysis

I synthesized all the documents and reports created by the previous design team and prepared a set of questionnaires to validate with different user groups.

I interviewed 12 users and conducted 3 focus group sessions to validate the insights.

I found most of their findings to be accurate and only minor changes were required to be altered. I ran a playback session for the stakeholders and the entire project team wherein I walked them through the user research findings. We mapped out the MVP features, created sprint plans, and decided to release the app in phases.

Key Insights

We derived the following insights from our research and data analysis sessions:

• Flexibility -Employees feel that the entire appraisal process and the application are not flexible to accommodate their needs and aspirations.
• Personalise - Adapting to the needs and aspirations of the associates will help cultivate a culture of continuous feedback and improvements.
• Accessibility - Reducing dependencies on devices and empowering employees with instant notifications and feedback will help increase adoption.
• Transparency - Automating quantitative objectives and promoting an open feedback culture fosters trust and reliability in the system

User Journeys

The personas that were created already were pretty solid and based on my user research I made some minor tweaks. We identified 8 personas that covered a majority of the user groups in the organization.

I collaborated with the Business analysts to construct the user journeys. We dissected the features and functionalities, collated key requirement ask against the features, and plotted a journey for all the defined personas.

Information Architecture

By constructing the journeys, we understood how the information flowed in the system.

We came up with structured navigation for each of the defined user roles. We wanted the navigation to be consistent, seamless, and easy to understand. Since the application had a huge user base, the user age range varied from 22 to 60 years.

We all agreed on a simple, minimalistic, and transparent structure to the app. We focused on the below key areas in defining the app structure.

Solution

Appraisee Flow

Almost 80% - 85% of employees in the organization will undergo an appraisal process, hence I wanted to set the foundation by cracking the Appraisee Flow.

Based on user inputs and business requirements, I synthesized that any designs or flows must satisfy the following criteria:

• Everyone is an Appraisee. Their appraisal process should be prioritized, easily accessible, and trackable.
• Evaluators and Reviewers should have a clear view of their team and their respective appraisal status.
• Evaluators and Reviewers should have a clear view of their pending tasks.
• Proper notifications for all key activities in the system.
• Personalized profile to keep track of their appraisals and activities.

The Landing page lists all the appraisals for the current year with key details such as Appraisal type, Project name, Personnel details, and Objectives information.

I created wireframes with 2 different layouts and navigational elements for the Appraisee flow. I created a functional prototype in Figma and conducted A/B testing with a select group of users. Based on the user inputs, we finalized a set of wireframes for the Appraisee Flow.

Evaluator & Reviewer Flow

Apart from working on their appraisal processes, the following were the key goals for an Evaluator/Reviewer:

• A clear view of the associates who report to them.
• Detailed information of the appraisal status of their team.
• Efficient ways to set objectives, share feedback, and rate them.
• Easy way to track their pending actions concerning the appraisal process.

My Team is a navigation element that is accessible only for the Evaluators and Reviewers. This page lists all the team members along with their respective appraisal progress.

The page will also have a clear distinction between Evaluator and Reviewer functions as almost 90% of reviewers will also function as evaluators.

Send a Reminder!

One of the most common user pain points was when their appraisal was pending with a particular person, there was no way to communicate with them within the system. They had to do it offline which does not always guarantee appraisal progress.

We addressed this issue by enabling the users to send a reminder to their evaluator/reviewer with whom the task is pending. However, to avoid spamming the receiver, reminders are spaced out and can be sent only once every 15 days.

By sending a reminder, the receiver gets a push notification/email informing them that a particular task is pending with them. Users can configure between push notifications or email or both.

Mobile App

One of the primary requirements of the appraisal revamp is to promote a culture of continuous feedback on user's objectives.

Having a mobile app will enable the users to receive notifications on mobile and act instantly to any queries posted. It will also enable users to track changes to the objectives, record progress, and have a conversation with their evaluators/reviewers as needed.

We designed and developed a hybrid mobile app on the same stack as the web. ReactJS and Java. Apart from the HR features, the rest all the features are retained in the mobile app.

Launching the website

The entire project was designed and developed in over 16 months. We worked in Agile with 4-week sprints.

Once the wireframes for all the flows were finalized, I started on the visual design of the application. We already had a brand guideline in place, so I followed the design direction mentioned in the guideline.

I collaborated with senior visual designers for review and refining the application. Once we developed the MVP, we ran a closed beta test with 100 users. We made minor iterations based on the user inputs and submitted the app for security testing.

As this is a company-wide initiative, I worked with HR managers, corporate communications to run awareness workshops and marketing campaigns in making the associates aware of the new system and process.

🚀 We successfully launched the web application on October 31, 2018.

The response was mostly positive and people loved the app performance and the new interface. We had ~90k logins in the first week but as expected the traffic gradually reduced in the weeks after launch.

Launching the mobile app

Post the web launch, we took a month's break to stabilize the site and work on any changes based on feedback.

I started working on a few user-flows for the mobile app during the web design phase itself. I created high-fidelity mockups based on brand guidelines for all the user journeys in the app.

Like the web, we worked in sprints and after successfully clearing the usability and security testing, we launched the mobile app on April 30, 2019. 🚀

The response was mostly positive and people loved the app performance and the new interface. We had ~120k logins in the first week but as expected the traffic gradually reduced in the weeks after launch.

The organization was planning to revamp few more modules associated with appraisals such as promotion, career hub, etc. But after working on this project for more than 16 months, I desired a break and exited the project.

I created a knowledge transition plan and handed over all the access and relevant files to my replacement.

Presently, the application team is doing a tremendous job is maintaining the app. They are continuously working towards creating a platform to measure quantitative objectives automatically thereby eliminating bias and also improving the app with bug fixes, new features.

Final Thoughts

This journey of 16 months was a fantastic learning experience filled with excitement, fun, and at times frustration. Some of my key takeaways from this project are:

• Establish a clear form of communication with the key stakeholders as a lot of conflicts arises from simple miscommunications.
• Support designs with facts. Even if it requires additional efforts as a designer, be ready to put in the work as you are advocating for the user.
• Take breaks from work as much as possible. Working continuously has serious consequences both physically and mentally.

I am immensely proud to be part of this project that despite all the hurdles, banded together in creating this amazing product, that has a positive impact on a large number of users.

Thank you for reading! 😀