CULTURE AMP

EMPLOYEE PROFILE

DESIGN BRIEF

The legacy Employee Profile currently fails to serve its intended purpose effectively - to ease the burden of a performance review and self-reflection process. Reimagining and enhancing the Employee Profile has become imperative for Culture Amp in order to achieve the broader company strategy of establishing a unified platform that empowers our users.

LEGACY PRODUCT

For context, the legacy Employee Profile was called the Dossier and was essentially a "folder" of content about a specific user. It was organized in to tabs based on product category and lacked UI consistency, UX best practices and recognizable patterns.

BACKGROUND & PROBLEMS

Culture Amp offers an array of effective tools for 1:1s, goal-setting, feedback, and performance reviews. While each feature functions well independently, there's untapped potential in integrating them into a cohesive culture platform. The Employee Profile, initially designed to consolidate employee information, has become disorganized and neglected over time, akin to a "junk drawer". Recognizing the opportunity to deliver enhanced value, Culture Amp is strategically reimagining and improving the Employee Profile as a critical step towards achieving two key company goals: 1. Proving the buyer value of an interconnected platform with continuous performance and 2. Creating a category defining manager experience.

BACKGROUND

PROBLEMS

Managers experience a high level of cognitive load and our platform needs to help with that load not add to it.
Performance reviews feel arbitrary and not personal. They feel like a box to check.
Content is hidden and not easily discoverable
The Employee Profile is not present across the platform nor in places where it could be most useful
Culture Amp is not a part of our users daily workflow- making habit formation difficult.

Pearl

Our target users are Pearl: People Leaders (mid-level managers) and Dillon: Direct Reports (Individual Contributors)

Dillon

TARGET USERS

GOALS

Discovery

Help managers get the context they need, when they need it.

Unification

Create a unified platform experience that promotes continuous feedback.

Connection

Transform the way managers connect with their direct reports.

Ease of Use

Make the performance review process easier by presenting content to the user that is accessible and not overwhelming.

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH

My team and I worked closely with the Data & Analytics team to better understand the usage of the Employee Profile as it related to the usage of the full Culture Amp platform. Some of the metrics we uncovered are:

70,000

264,000

Only ~1,000

Monthly users of the Perform product suite (PPS)

PPS users with content in their Employee Profile (EP)

Users have all 4 units of content in their EP (Goals, Self-Reflections, 1-1s notes, Feedback)

13%

57%

85%

of PPS users have created a goal in the last 6 months

of PPS users will have at least 1 piece of content in their EP

of PPS users have Self-Reflections displayed in their EP

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

We ran user interviews with a group of users from both the United States and Australia to better understand their wants and needs. Our research with users solidified our awareness of the problem space and helped to validate 4 key solution pillars:

Confidence

Pearl is aware of the importance of the performance review and is worried they will do it wrong. We need to figure out the most efficient ways to display helpful information and guidance within the EP as well as uncover what content types and display formats are the most impactful.

Relevance

Pearl starts reviews with a position on the employee that they have formed over time and/or based on self-reflection. They then seek supporting or contradicting evidence. As a result, it’s a pain to sift through reams of content that is arranged by our feature tabs to try and find useful content. To make performance a lighter lift it's important for us to present information to the user thats relevant to the task at hand.

Connection

Our platform offers immense value through it's various tools but nothing unites their independent values making the platform feel disconnected for Pearl and Dillon. We need to bring the Employee Profile to other parts of our platform, not just the Perform Suite.

Familiarity

Pearl and Dillon question why content is grouped by 'channel of origin' in the legacy EP (i.e., in tabs based on product categories like Goals Or Shoutouts). It feels too much about Culture Amp, and not enough about what the user is trying to achieve in the moment. Discovering relevant content feels difficult. We need to make the experience of engaging with the EP more familiar and helpful for our users.

NEW VISION

Through our understanding of the problem space, our quantitative and qualitative research, organizational goals and working with stakeholders we identified a new vision for the Employee Profile:

A searchable and filterable dynamic content feed that surfaces relevant information to the users and goes beyond the Perform suite; starting with 1-on-1s and then the Culture Amp homepage. It will exist as an Inspector in the sidebar space as well as having a completely new dedicated full-page experience that services as both a profile of an employee and a dashboard for their manager.

DESIGN HIGHLIGHTS

A traditional timeline provides familiar interaction patterns and look/feel

Sorting, searching and filtering the content surfaces relevant information based on context

At-a-glance insights that provide previews of detailed breakdowns

Default sorting in chronological order helps managers and direct reports connect the dots

Organizing content with tags such as company values or positive or constructive feedback helps employees form holistic pictures of performance

A consistent design language utilizing UX best practices.

PRODUCT TOUR

Here is a video walkthrough of an early stage version of the EP redesign where I talk through some of our design thinking and the changes we've made.