Last year, after my first self-started pandemic project, I did start another one that I never quite finished- until I happened to take another look at my old portfolio and decided hey, why not restart this.
I wanted to explore workplace SaaS products and find a problem to solve or fix- but found it difficult to fill a hole in the saturated and well-serviced and designed workplace SaaS industry. After a lot of deliberating and searching, I decided that I wanted to create an HR-friendly web app to support office morale and build on company culture.
You can find the almost finished prototype here.
From an employee's perspective, you want to believe the office cultural pillars at your workplace- and employers want their employees to believe in them too. But office cultural beliefs arent' tangible enough for either party to measure- making it difficult to build on. I want to create an app to make office culture tangible and actionable.
Looking into the current apps designed build office culture, I found ones that reward employees individually, but not as a team. While this may work for workplaces that know how to nurture healthy competition, I think that I want to alternatively build an app that builds on office culture by team rewards.
I had 3 very generous friends participate on a Trello board to add things they did or their co-workers did at work that they felt made a positive impact at their work culturally.
They also did a paragraph-long write-up of how the Kanban list impacted their mood throughout the day for each day they participated. All 3 participants submitted 5 days worth of data. My participants had each experienced at least 1 healthy work culture and 1 toxic one.
Afterwards, I interviewed each friend/participant and talked them through the experience. I found this to be a good opportunity to have my participants open up about their workplace experiences and tell me things about their workplace culture and how they think it could be improved- things that would usually be missed if an interview commenced immediately.
One thing I noticed in my research was that the most positive thing my participants felt (besides one other I'll get to next) was when they felt acknowledged- even by coworkers. I want to make crediting others a major feature. In addition, the language of the app needs to be more teamwork-oriented. E.g: "Join" "Contribute" "Help out ___ and make an office cleanup schedule"
There was a visible confusion between work accomplishments and other non work-related accomplishments on the Kanban board. Because I'd asked my friends to mark any accomplishment related to their work culture, they wrote things down on a board called "Miscellanous" that I for sure thought would be nearly empty. Instead, that board had more items than the other ones by far- and were filled with what I will now call "invisible accomplishments"- things like watering the flowers, recycling their lunch leftovers, proposing a work outing. These things were things that they weren't acknowledged for, but still felt pride for (this, I should mention, depended on the level of the workplace toxicity.)
I wanted to experiment and try a different to-do list SaaS visualization. I figured that since this was my own project that it's a good opportunity to just go ham with the visuals and let loose.
Eventually I settled on a honey comb design (which is where I got the name "Honey Guide from- a bird that guides humans to honey") which I found was satisfyingly infinitely modular as well as visually pleasant to look at.
I've completed the mockup and prototype as follows. Buuut, I wasn't able to implement seeing all activities that are under the same category and at the same stage. For one, It looked too busy, and I also have to figure out a way to implement it on Figma.
Alas! I'll work on incorporating that, as well as the rewards program I had in mind (employees get rewarded for every row they complete) In the meantime, enjoy the prototype here!
