HighGround Internship

Redesigning how employees get feedback about their job performance.

Background

HighGround was a B2B SaaS performance management and recognition software. During my time as an intern with them, I lead the creation of a new design system, and assisted with user testing and prototyping for multiple projects. My main project, which I will discuss here, was improving the user experience of their Feedback feature.

Primary Responsibilities

Requirements Gathering

Gathering requirements from and consulting with a variety of internal stakeholders.

Wireframing & Prototyping

Creating a series of wireframes in Sketch, adjusting them based on feedback, and then creating an interactive prototype using InVision.

Information Architecture

Creating user flows and ensuring that information on the webapp was presented in a way to make it as simple as possible for users to complete given tasks.

Design System Management

Using InVision Design System Manager to create and manage a library of old and new components and document the context and situations in which they should be used.

Feedback Feature Redesign

The Feedback feature allowed admins to create different types of feedback forms.

Employees and managers could then request feedback about themselves or about others.

I was tasked with improving the user experience of both parts of this process for the desktop and mobile versions of the app.

Process

I started this process by creating a user flow of the entire feedback process in order to better understand all of the intricacies of the feature. At the end of this project, you can see a version that I updated with all of the changes I made to the process.

I then talked to some customer service representatives within the company who told me all about issues customers have had and changes they have asked for and complaints they have had over the years. I managed to gain a number of great insights from this process that I will go into later.

Please visit on desktop to see more of this project.

From there, I began to sketch out and mock up some of my initial ideas.

After that, the rest of my time on this project was spent iterating in Sketch, getting feedback, and making changes.

I then created a user testing guide in preparation testing a prototype of my interface with users.

Sadly, due to factors out of my control, I was unable to see the rest of the project through before the end of my internship. However, my work did end up being used as the basis for the redesign when the time came.

Employee Portal

Requesting, Giving and Receiving Feedback

The employee portal is where managers and employees go to request, give, and view feedback about themselves and others. There are many different types of feedback requests with different restrictions on who can request, see, and view them, and everything was presented to the user via the feedback inbox.

However, after hearing from users, it became clear that it was hard for employees to keep track of what type of feedback they were dealing with, and what action they needed to take with it.

Additionally, another big complaint was the lack of ability to send reminders and reopen expired feedback requests.

Below, you can see the original and redesigned versions of the admin portal, and an explanation of some of the most glaring issues. Hover over the redesigned version with your mouse to see the changes I made.

Original Version

Redesigned Version

(Hover over the numbers to see explanations of the changes I made)

Added icons to help better distinguish different types of feedback.

Added ability to send reminders to complete feedback requests.

Added ability to reopen expired feedback requests.

Redesigned feedback card to fit with new UI style.

"360 Feedback", (feedback completed by entire team) was previously hidden in separate section.

Combined all forms of feedback into one tab and created drafts section.

Inbox isn't organized in any meaningful way, and has minimal filtering options, making it hard for users to keep track of what needs to be done.

Split inbox into sections based on the status of each request and what action the user needed to take to make it easier to manage inbox.

Missing a lot of important information about when feedback was requested and its status.

Added extra info to give more context about status of each different type of feedback.

Additional changes I made to the employee portal included mainly centered around redesigning the UI to fit the new style I helped put together as well as some minor tweaks to the feedback processes I made based on what I heard from the users.

Here are the old and new versions of the pages to request feedback and give feedback. I overhauled the UI to increase clarity and to fit with the new UI style I helped put together.

Requesting Feedback

(Hover over the image to see my redesigned version)

Giving Feedback

(Hover over the image to see my redesigned version)

Admin Portal

Creating and Managing Feedback Forms

The admin portal is where a company's admins would go to create a new feedback form to be used throughout their company. They could create different types of forms, write questions, toggle settings, and choose who to send the form to.

After pinpointing a number of glaring issues on my own and working learning about customer complaints through our customer success team, I discovered that most of the issues users were facing boiled down to two main issues:
- 1. The process for adding questions and sections took too long and could be streamlined.
- 2. There was a lot of confusion about the different options and what they entailed that could be fixed by moving some steps around and making the wording in some areas more clear.

Original Version

Redesigned Version

(Hover over the numbers to see explanations of the changes I made)

Not available on mobile

Added new UI icons to make it easier to switch between question types.

Added ability to duplicate questions to make it quicker and easier to create forms with multiple similar questions.

Redesigned UI to fit with the new style I helped create.

Gave admins the option of letting the requester set the due date of the form.

These questions had confusing wording, and admins may not have known the answer to them prior to creating questions, so I moved them to the next page

Moved these two questions from the previous page since their answer may not be known until now.

I also reworded them and added an explanation for clarity, and turned them into toggle switches rather than dropdowns.

Previously needed to check both of these boxes to bring up the button to add a section.

Streamlined process to break the form into sections. The process previously required three clicks and now only requires one.

The recipient-choosing process was confusing. It was hard to tell what went into each input, and users could not see their options for each input. They just needed to blindly type in their input.

Clarified input types and made recipient selection into dropdowns in which you could also start typing.

Overall Feedback Process

I also made a number of minor tweaks throughout the feedback process to make the process more streamlined and intuitive.

To give you a glimpse of the breadth of changes I ended up making, here is the user flow diagram that I made of the original version of the feedback feature.

Solid blue boxes are steps I added to the process, and boxes with blue outlines are steps I reordered.

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