Overview

In this modern world of hybrid working, teams struggle to build strong team culture, finding it difficult to get a grasp of where the team members are at and how they are feeling.

I was part of an amazing CaaS (Culture As A Service) start up project to create an app that empowers teams to create their own reality and meaningful connections.

Designing a novel interface with the new methodology for data input and visualisation was one of the biggest challenges we had. However, the close-knit collaboration with another designer and developers and iterative process with usability tests helped us move efficiently and allowed us to create the great end results.

Challenge/ problem

Since the COVID-19 outbreak in 2019, a lot of organisations have shifted to hybrid or remote working. Despite the effort to make the team engaged, teams were feeling disconnection and fragmentation, lacking human contacts they used to have in the office. Teams were drifting apart, as they keep working in isolation.

There was also ‘survey fatigue’ since before the remote working trend. Existing cultural engagement data were obtained through outdated methodology. Traditional surveys — that are usually wordy and lengthy — provided the management some insights, but the data was often not fully shared with the teams. The teams were not engaged and the management or the HR department struggled to develop strong team culture.

The team at Neuropower was aware of these trends and came to us to change the way organisations build engagement. Our goals at a high level were to:

• Empower teams to create their own reality and meaningful connections.
• Enable management and HR to capture an accurate picture of engagement.
• Create an effective way of building engagement at scale.

My role

I worked on the design of the app alongside another designer in the team. We were in a close-knit team with developers, product lead and founders from the Neuropower Group during the process.
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What I worked on includes: discovery research, ideation, wireframing, prototyping, branding, usability testing and marketing design.

Kick-off

Before we could dive deep into the discovery, we asked  the team at Neuropower to share any resources they had up to the point. They had conducted a lot of research and we wanted to make sure we were all on the same page as we started the journey.

Discovery & validation

We had a few discovery workshops with the Neuropower team to align on the findings and thinking they had. Goals for these workshops included unpacking vision and values for the brand and understanding the problem space.

One of the main topics we covered was methodology; the founders had a method that was largely informed by leading Neuroscience research from the Neuropower Group.

The method is based on the Six Social Cognitive Needs Frameworks it takes clusters of team-based data through a unique data input method, as opposed to binary evaluation scales that do not allow for rich exploration and learning.

In addition, we took a deep dive into competitor research and identified our target audiences. At the stage, we defined our audience groups: team members who are users and team leaders who are choosers of the product. We had jobs, goals, needs, and pain points listed for each.

We had a few workshops with potential users to uncover and validate their pain points. A couple of common themes across all were:

• Feeling disconnected from team communication
• Lack of natural connections and relationships they used to have in the office
• Missing physical energy and body language

Once the pain points were validated, we created our ‘north star’ that we can refer to along the way.

“The tool empowers teams with transparent, frequent and rich data to understand themselves and grow on their own terms.”

Ideation

With the methodology and findings up to the point in mind, we ran a sketching workshop for all the team members, including the founders, to attend. We, then, voted for ideas we think work best. Some of them included:

• Ability to vote for themes to create surveys around
• Ability to raise issues anonymously while keeping them visible to all
• Visualisation of data change over time

It was important for us to create a user flow as the tool could get quite complex. After a couple of iterations along with the other parts of ideation, the user flow that captured the end-to-end journey of users was completed.

MVB (Minimum Viable Brand)

Creating a brand for this product was one of the challenging, but interesting experiences. First of all, we selected the brand archetypes for this brand — Explorer, Everyman and Creator. So, based on the themes of “originality, exploration and connection/belonging”, the other designer and I started collecting inspiration for our mood boards.

With feedback from the founders and team, we proceed to narrowing down our colour palettes, typography and graphics. The next step we moved on to was applying those to a few of example UI screens, as we wanted to make sure we select right elements that work with the unique, somewhat complex screen designs.

However, this was a tricky situation that made everyone feel like the visual elements are not the best option — and it is understandable, because they were applied to example UI screens. We quickly decided to shift our direction to applying the elements to an example landing page, which is a lot less complex. This way we managed to show how the brand visual elements could be in action without confusing everyone.

We iterated on them several times with user feedback and finally came up with a brand pack that we are happy with.

The logomark represents the underwater sound (Bloop) in the product name (Bloople=Bloop+People). It is also in the shape of B which is the initial of the name.

Initial app design

Once we had the user flow, we began the design phase with low/mid fidelity prototypes to explore high level flows and concepts. This was progressed in parallel to the branding phase, which I explained above.

We knew at this point that there would have to be 3 different levels of users — Admin, Team leader and Team member, in the order of levels of access to different data and screens. This enables team leaders and HR to gain a better understanding of the team and build team culture without gaining too much control. A few of the low-fidelity screens are shown below.

High-fidelity design

The following step after receiving feedback on the low fidelity prototypes and creating the brand was to start applying the brand to create high fidelity prototypes. Some of the main features we designed include: onboarding, theme voting, data capture and data exploration.

Above all, the most interesting and challenging part to design was the triangle, in which clusters of team-based wellbeing data is shown in a unique way. I collaborated with the other designer and had so many iterations with testing.

Go-to-market Strategy

As part of the GTM strategy, I created social media templates, ads and videos that the founders can utilise. Below is an example template for social media.