Background

This is a self-started side project I'm in the middle of. 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

Click here to jump to the mockup!

What problems I wanted to solve

It's hard to measure office cultural values

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.

Current apps that build office culture breed competition

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.

Initial Research

Concept testing + Diary Studies

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.

Interview

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. I will definitely be doing more concept testing in the future!

Insights and Decisions from Research

Crediting others should be a primary feature

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"

Highlight the invisible team accomplishments

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.)

Initial Paper Mockups

Visualization

I wanted to experiment and try a different to-do list SaaS visualization. For funzies.

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.

Mocking up the elements

ITERATION: PROTOTYPE

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!