My Work by BambooHR
BambooHR is an all-in-one HR software with a heart. Despite steady growth and happy clients, their mobile app paled in comparison to their desktop experience. BambooHR needed a way to improve their mobile app experience.
User research
User Personas
Design Sprint methodology
UI design
Team
My Role
1 UX Researcher
1 Interaction Designer
BACKGROUND
Loved by HR team, forgotten by employees
DISCOVER
BambooHR is a leading software provider powering the strategic evolution of HR in small and medium businesses. Since 2008, it has served 15,000+ customers with its suite of tools that help them focus on people over process.
Despite many success stories, BambooHR only occupied a small slice of the HR software market. My team was tasked to identify and capitalize on a design opportunity that would help BambooHR improve their current user experience, and acquire new business.
We went on to conduct interviews and analyze online reviews from BambooHR’s 2 users groups: HR team & employees.
The feedback we received showed that the mobile app was intended for employee use, and didn’t receive the same care and attention that went into developing the desktop product. Here’s a roundup of what current users had to say about BambooHR:
In early research, we noticed a usability gap between the desktop and mobile experience. The desktop version included detailed reporting, analysis, and workflow management features, whereas the mobile app supported a limited feature set of vacation tracking and employee directory:
Improving the mobile experience would help BambooHR retain existing customers and go after new prospects. For a business with the philosophy “people over processes”, BambooHR was in a perfect position to reinforce their brand mission and solve a problem for their customers’ 150,000+ employees.
Tech workers:
2.5x more likely to experience mental health issues vs. average
After finding out that the tech industry makes up 29% of BambooHR’s existing client list, we decided to focus on tech employees as our core mobile user. From there, we uncovered another curious insight: tech employees are 2.5x more likely to suffer from mental health disorders than the average North American worker.
Stress impacts work for most users, but they’re not reaching out for help
Intrigued by these numbers, we proceeded to better understand tech employees and their relationship with mental health at work. In total, we collected:
Using the raw responses from our user interviews and survey, we executed an open card sort in order to organize our findings into undefined categories. Through thematic analysis, we identified stress as the #1 challenge experienced by users at work. From there, we went on to discover what our users’ top stressors were, their current coping mechanisms, and why they seldom took action despite feeling stressed.
Scroll through the infographic below to see our key user insights:
In order to better understand our users, we asked an existing BambooHR user how she would hypothetically interact with the current app to deal with stress at work. From there, we were able to document her steps taken as well as her emotional state throughout the process:
DEFINE
At this point in discovery, we had enough information to craft a user persona and converge on a design problem:
How might we… enhance the mobile experience on BambooHR by helping employees feel more productive and balanced at work?
From crazy 8s to
1 solution
DESIGN
We began our design phase by producing rapid sketches using crazy eights, a Design Sprint methodology:
Despite completing the exercise separately, our sketches showed strong overlap in design direction. Each included references to an informational dashboard, an emotional tracker, and a “connect with someone” functionality. These would later become the core elements of our new product line, which we coined
My Work by BambooHR.
TEST
Empowering
communication
through data
We created 4 design iterations, and tested them across 10 users who matched our persona (tech industry employee, have experienced work-related stress):
We employed 2 testing methodologies:
Naturalistic observations: we asked subjects to “find out how much you have on your plate, and try to reduce your workload” and simply watched how they interacted with our prototypes. We asked users to think out loud and speak to why they liked or disliked a particular part of the experience, without probing further.
Semi-structured interviews: At one point during testing, 2 divergent design concepts that prevented us from moving forward to help us we asked subjects to answer the following Y/N questions to ensure that our designs did not only meet our task goal, but also qualitative user and business goals. We then asked follow-up questions to understand the rationale behind their responses:
The app gives me clarity about my workload
The app gives me the options I need to manage my workload
The app reduces my level of stress
After 10 tests, we observed enough patterns that allowed us to improved upon positive experiences, and re-engineer negative ones. Based on our testing results, we decided to forgo the emotional tracker feature and double down on the utility of the calendar feature. Below is a summary of our findings:
DELIVER
For our final iteration, we created a new flow that strives to solve our user problem in a quantifiable and contextual way:
My Work makes
the dream work
For the final product, we followed Shneiderman’s mantra: overview first, zoom and filter, then details ondemand. This way, we were able to integrate all our learnings and design a mobile experience that was efficient, effective, and empathetic.
Take a stroll through our bamboo forest below:
Managing mental health at work:
a balancing act
REFLECT
In North America, many businesses still prioritize output over people. When we prompted users to open up through an emotional tracker, it only heightened their stress levels because they were afraid their feedback would be misconstrued. However, work is the source of most of their stress - and if unmanaged, could lead to burnout or other more serious outcomes.
Through this project, I learned the importance of tracking stress in quantifiable ways. Asking users to share their feelings with HR can breed distrust and dissonance, but translating them into productivity metrics - like capacity or meeting conflicts - would complement their motivation to succeed at work. My Work by BambooHR may not solve the larger mental health crisis, but it can pave the way for improved documentation, transparency, and communication around the day-to-day tasks that shape an employee’s experience at work.
