SigBee's simple check-in keeps employees and their supervisors connected through quick and timely surveys. The platform analyzes responses to provide supervisors and their organizations with proactive signals that drive meaningful conversations and action.

As an emerging start-up, SigBee was struggling with customer adoption and engagement, and needed an adaptable partner to support many demanding priorities. I partnered with their product, engineerings, and customer success teams to explore new customer touchpoints with a web-based platform, mobile app, and Slack integration.

• Feature Richness & Usability: The new designs provide supervisors with more actionable features, making it easier to collect information, interpret trends, and support their teams.
• Accessible Data & Insights: Improved visualizations and filtering enhanced the supervisor experience, allowing for better-informed decisions based on real-time data.
• New Slack Integration: Users can access the portal directly from Slack to receive timely alerts, review scores, and access manager resources.

First, to uncover specific problems and explore opportunities to evolve the product, I co-led a research initiative in collaboration with my associate director. We released an evaluative survey to current users to identify experience pain points while simultaneously facilitating qualitative interviews with prospective customers to learn about their tooling needs.

8 customer interviews and 56 survey responses (10.3% response rate) yielded key insights and strategic direction:

• The platform had no way for supervisors to facilitate conversations with employees or take action from their signals. It was not only hard to use but also did not work on small device breakpoints.
• Supervisors were generally wary of new tooling and had a strong preference for engaging with their team via communication tools such as Slack.
  

SigBee couldn't throw out the platform they had already built, but the team was energized by the opportunity to build integrations with popular tools to reach more customers.

I led efforts to brainstorm blue sky ideas and define technical limitations, conducting a competitive audit of 12 integration-first products and plotted features on an impact-effort matrix to align on several key features: check-in alerts and summaries, weekly reports, and urgent alerts for employees in distress.

Building an integration required strategic design thinking, not screens, so I created user flows representing interactions and logic to provide the product and engineering teams direction. The engineers appreciated the simple diagram format, but I also attached Loom recordings and notes to each user flow to ensure clarity.

The survey indicated that supervisors struggled to manage their teams on the platform, so we interviewed SigBee’s VP of Customer Success and product managers to understand their interactions with customers and identify process breakdowns.

We found that SigBee's manual data collection and lengthy client communications were error-prone and inefficient. Mapping the customer journey highlighted process breakdowns, and we recommended two new initiatives:

1. Admin Management Portal: Supervisors can add, remove, and update employee information in bulk with CSV upload and HR system integrations.
2. Teammate Invitations: Supervisors can invite employees through their own onboarding process, reducing errors from HR systems.

My team initially thought these ideas were isolated features, but later folded them into a larger plan to streamline technical complexity with a more holistic overhaul the supervisor dashboard and platform features. Sharing these ideas and documentation with the product team, we then shifted focus on this new opportunity.

SigBee's data showed that supervisors were their most engaged users, who used a web-based dashboard to review employee check-ins and trends. I conducted a heuristic UX audit over the supervisor web portal to identify key design and interaction problems to solve:

• Visual Design: Screen design suffered from broken layouts at different breakpoints, and SigBee's color palette was hard to read and not accessible.
• Discoverability: Data visualizations were challenging to decipher, controls were difficult to locate, and check-in data was hierarchically inconsistent across screens.
• Information Recall: Different data was scattered between screens, making it an ordeal to get the full picture of an employee's check-in scores.
• System Status: The dashboard lacked commonly expected controls, such as search, data filtering, and in-app notifications.

These insights showed me specific areas of focus to improve the experience of the dashboard before iterating, and gave the SigBee the perspective to understand possible root causes deteriorating user experience.

Over several sprints, I led the iteration, design, and testing of the redesigned web portal, supported by my associate director. We worked rapidly to deliver concepts to SigBee's team and keep them in the loop, ultimately creating new designs for the main dashboard, user page, team and employee profile, and account center. Important improvements included:

• Polished UI: A minimalist visual style uses subtle contrast ratios between neutral and interactive UI elements to make functionality more obvious. Semantic colors reinforce the meaning of data and make screen easier to scan.
• Centralized Navigation: Employees and teams are always visible in the main navigation for increased productivity.
• Clear & Visible Cues: A "statistical center" at the top of screens keeps data in context with data analysis, score urgency, and overviews of specific questions.
• Meaningful Data Visualizations: More appropriate visualizations and simpler filtering offer effective ways to dig into check-in information.

As we settled into the rapid cadence, I transitioned to independently support SigBee and build on the ideas we had already delivered and designed. I collaborated closely with the VPs of product and engineering to add new features to the web portal such as interactive data visualizations and group surveys via Slack. I also translated the new UI from the web portal to their iOS app.

These opportunities to add more "feedback loops" into the platform allowed me to mature a design system framework and create more documentation for SigBee's product and engineering teams.

The Slack integration I designed enables supervisors to access all the insights they need from SigBee without every opening the app with helpful features such as:

• Check-In Alerts and Commands: Scheduled alerts and integration commands to complete check-ins from Slack.
• Check-In Summaries: Inline commands and automatic alerts to get check-in summaries, with the ability to remind and acknowledge individual employees.
• Responsive Support: Special alerts when employees check-in low and guided resources for resolution.
  
• Weekly Reports: Alerts for weekly summaries with key takeaways in Slack and external links to the supervisor dashboard.
  

The redesigned dashboard comes with sleek UI, improved navigation, support for responsiveness, and new ways to review insights and take action.

Teams are front and center in the experience with individual employees always accessible from the primary navigation. The dashboard shows the supervisor a summary of their team’s check-ins and trends, with more options to dig deeper into specific responses or time-bound reports.

The employee check-in iOS app shares the same product identity as the supervisor dashboard, with unique components optimized for device-specific interactions. The improved check-in flow comes with better inputs and feedback, and users can customize their experience with streamlined app settings.

With my experience design mobile apps, I was able to anticipate how to translate web components to iOS, provide developers with annotations with links to specific interaction patterns supported Human Interface Guidelines.