Bravo is an employee engagement and rewards program used by all associates in BI WORLDWIDE. They are a global engagement agency that uses the principles of behavioral economics to produce measurable business results by designing and delivering solutions that engage employees, channel partners, and customers.
This summer I was given the opportunity to work as the Presentation Design Intern at BIW. Given a short time frame, I was tasked to redesign Bravo in collaboration with Jae-Lah Lymon (Account Manager Intern) and Tori Hagstrom (Data Analyst Intern). Bravo is used by all associates across all offices including in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Latin America, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.
for: BI WORLDWIDE, Edina, Minnesota
Date: Summer 2021
supervisor: Troy Grengs
contributors: Jae-Lah Lymon, Tori Hagstrom, Cassandra Ho
my role: UX Design, User Research, User Testing, Brand Design
Adobe App(s) used: Illustrator, XD, Photoshop
Problem
As BIW's goal is to bring employee value proposition to life, we knew Bravo would be key for the full adoption and satisfaction of our application. Users found that:
✦ The current website is confusing, time-consuming, and arduous
✦ The processes were ill-planned and poorly executed
✦ The layout was messy and not intuitive
✦ The e-cards were unorganized and difficult to find
✦ It was difficult to look for past/sent recognitions
✦ The profile page was unorganized and not easily accessible
Goal
Our objective with the redesign was to create a system that could be readily adopted by current and new BIW associates, then later client users. The product would have to meet both legal and business requirements but also user needs so they can recognize and reward colleagues in a timely and intuitive way.
✦ Reduce time spent on creating recognitions
✦ Ease the process of looking for past/sent recognitions
✦ Consolidate similar user flows that cause confusion
research
We facilitated interviews with 12 interns to gain their perspective as new users and 5 full-time associates who have had experiences using Bravo - to ensure all facets of users were addressed and studied. Targeting those who had the most experience in using Bravo would allow their voices to be heard proactively rather than reactively. We also compared Bravo with other competitors such as WorkHuman, OC Tanner, and iAchievers. The questions include:
✦ How do you create recognition?
✦ How do you look for past recognition?
✦ What key pain points do you find while creating recognitions?
We found from the interviews that the interns were bothered by the time it took to understand the program due to its unintuitive layout and function. Whereas full-time associates found it time-consuming to create recognitions and the inflexibility of the program to be a nuisance.
final prototype – sending recognitions
After the testing and iterations of prototypes, we came to a final solution that would wield the quickest and more intuitive way of creating recognitions. Drawing on modern UI trends, I defined a visual style and designed a user interface that contrasts other employee recognition programs. Users complained that competing design is dated and hard-to-use, motivating us to do differently with our designs.
By removing unnecessary features, reducing the font size, and improving the user interface, we were able to improve the user success rate and efficiency.
E-cards are now searchable, categorized, and organized in a more effective way, making the recognition process more efficient.
final prototype – work anniversaries
Associates of 25 years or more will have their own banner on the anniversaries page. To celebrate their achievement, I decided to create a larger, eye-catching anniversary card so other associates can easily notice and recognize their achievements.
✦ Upcoming and past anniversaries are more visible
✦ Users can easily look for associates that they want to recognize or have recognized
✦ Team members' anniversaries can be viewed first
✦ Upcoming birthdays indicated on the right-side panel
Next steps
As I move into the final stage of Bravo's design and development, my next steps are to:
✦ Finalize the design of the remaining screens (profile, information, redeem, settings)
✦ Undertake extensive usability testing to allow me to refine current features and content
learnings and takeaways
Creating the first outlines of an employee engagement and rewards program was interesting, and taking the project from research to testing helped me get experience in areas of product design I hadn’t explored much before and expand my skill set within the discovery and design stages. Specifically, the opportunity to plan and conduct user interviews has taught me how to closely hone in on the root of the problem and gather insights that will help drive customer-centric design. All the insights gain through interviews really helped me handle the issues encountered during wireframing.
However, we only had 18 days to plan, discuss, and finalize this project. With such a short time frame, we had to use the most of it and move on to the final, high-fidelity prototype very quickly.
In the future, I would probably spend more time consolidating and planning out the wireframes and have a deeper understanding of each aspect of the website and its functions.
