WorkTango 💃
Problem
Engagement in WorkTango's “Goals” declined as the user base shifted from SME companies to larger corporations. How can design reverse this trend and make this product sticky?
Year
2022
Product
Goal setting
What motivates employees to set Goals?
Pro-active contributors
WorkTango’s first product was an employee recognition tool designed to give kudos to coworkers for exceptional contributions. “Goals” was envisioned as an evolution of this employee-first framework and designed to cater to individuals seeking to track and credit their achievements.
Performance management programs
In reality, 70% of Goals logged into the WorkTango platform were created by Admins in 2022 (with only 25% created by users with contributor access and 5% by managers). This data (along with high activity logged in December and January) suggests that our users were primarily creating Goals in response to company-wide initiatives.
How can we use this information to help drive adoption at bigger companies?
Admin-led goals programs might work for small businesses where a few champions can set up a framework for the company. But at corporations with thousands of employees (and therefore thousands of Goals) - the framework does not scale.
Who are the users?
Dividing our users into three groups:
Administrators, HR leads responsible for program management and acting on behalf of company leaders
Team leaders, All managers under the C-suite
Contributors, Employees without management duties
and analyzing our metrics. It became clear that the Team leader/Managers (with only 5% of goals created) were the group struggling to adopt the feature set the most.
Solving the needs of these team leads ended up being the key to success in this project.
How different are our users’ needs?
After interviewing users of different roles, it turns out that they are very different.
The admin and IC experiences were built out as two separate flows to begin with; however, while there were certain base functionalities created for team leads, on further inspection - none of their high priority user flows were optimized (if enabled at all).
Old
The old “Goal details” page (right) is an example of how the goals feature set was designed with the IC in mind.
Goals could be created with a hierarchy and linked together; however, completion of these goals, “Measurable results”, and all other features were the same regardless of goal hierarchy.
Old
The “Goal alignment” view was also somewhat of an afterthought.
This chart is a powerful view into how all of the goals at a company fit together; however, it was full of pain points for our customers and it is not hard to see how the visualization falls apart at scale.
New
Along with some visual clean up. The main feature I want to draw your attention to in the redesign (right) is the two lines that say “Onboard my teammates” and “Host demo meetings”.
These are two “child” goals, and by both showing them in the context of their parent, and linking the progress of the parent to their completion, we created a much smoother paradigm for team leads to both create goals and have them progress automatically based on work from their team.
New
The new alignment view (right) fits all goals into the normal screen view, is interactive (clicking on a goal progressively reveals its children), and most importantly, is scalable (with search and scroll, all goals are only a finger tip away and can fit on a screen).
In Conclusion..
This was one of many projects I led at WorkTango. I chose to showcase it in my portfolio because it demonstrates a summary of my end-to-end process (data, discovery > problem solving, design).
It was also a successful effort, earning a gradual increase in Goals engagement ~3-4% per month after launch, culminating in January with 34% more weekly engagement than the year before.
Like any project, there were ups and downs (and more I would have liked to be able to do), but the groundwork done here left the feature in a much better spot than before, and created a framework to further enhance the feature in the future.