REDESIGNING THE COMPANY'S MASCOT

A SaaS B2B Product Feature

Creating the User Sentiment Survey

About the project

In today's digital era, IT admins are crucial for business operations, fixing technical issues and ensuring security. Yet, a communication gap often frustrates employees. This project aims to create an efficient system for quick communication between IT admins and employees, boosting productivity.

My task is to enhance communication and address diverse technical issues, improving the overall digital employee experience.

Research

I explored various user survey methods, first understanding the user's needs and interactions with the product. Next, I assessed email, chatbot, and popup survey options, weighing their pros and cons. Ultimately, I chose a popup survey for IT admins, as it's the most efficient way to gather necessary information.

The Problem:

Part of my research was to consider the challenges of using a popup survey, which I wanted to avoid:

User discomfort and popup distrust: Users avoid surveys.

Pop-ups are often distrusted.

Popup interruptions can be ignored or closed, leading to low survey completion and a lack of insights for managers.

The Solution:
Boosting Engagement and Trust

Initially focusing on the user sentiment survey, I expanded my perspective to consider the employee's experience. This led me to create flows and prototypes for both the IT admin and the employee, uncovering opportunities to benefit both, which I'll discuss further.

Research

Understanding the user persona

This survey will benefit two main personas:

The HR manager, who is responsible for employee happiness and satisfaction.

I chose to focus on the IT admin because it is a very common scenario which I am well acquainted with personally from working at our own company, which made it easier for me to relate and empathize with him.

The IT admin, who helps employees with technical issues.

Pain Points

In our daily tasks, we rely more on technology, which doesn't always perform optimally. Challenges such as poor internet connections, system updates, or hardware issues may occur. Adding to this complexity, IT admins responsible for resolving these problems may be located in various geographical areas, spanning different cities or countries. These differences in time zones can pose a challenge for IT admins when addressing employee needs.

Unreliable technology: IT admins troubleshoot diverse devices and software for remote employees, a time-consuming task..

Communication challenges: Effectively communicating with remote employees can lead to misunderstandings and delays.

Time zone differences: Scheduling support calls and providing timely assistance becomes challenging with IT admins and remote employees in different time zones.

Goals

Improve IT admin visibility into employee status.

Simplify the process of submitting and tracking support tickets.

Automate common support tasks.

Enable the IT admin to access every user response through the dashboard, showcasing response percentages, average scores, and additional details.

Approach:

Create tailored surveys for ad groups and individuals.

Customize questions based on specific needs.

Innovation:

Streamline support tasks.

Automate issue resolution using predefined content.

Increase employee engagement to enhance response rates and gather more data on their status and experience.

User Flow - Creating the Survey

The survey design process is broken down into seven segments, allowing the IT admin to save and publish surveys at their convenience. Emphasizing simplicity and clarity, I incorporated pre-made relevant questions, a clean interface, and a clear hierarchy to facilitate quick and easy survey creation for the IT admin.

Designing the wireframes

I created three primary wireframe designs: one for the survey popup, another for the dashboard, and a third for the employee popup. The dashboard will visually represent all data collected from employees, including response results and additional details.

For the employee popup, I designed a simplified version to align with the company's brand features chosen by the IT admin for the survey popup, including the logo, size, and location on the screen.

Using Microinteractions with Animated Emojis?

I incorporated small animations into emoji survey questions to make the survey more engaging, using small user delight moments, aiming to increase survey participation and improve the user experience.

Additionally, I researched other surveys that used emojis to learn what could be useful (as well as what I should avoid).

My research revealed strengths and weaknesses, guiding my decision-making and strategies for improvement.

One of the things that bothered me the most was that many surveys used emojis that looked too similar; others used the same colors, which was confusing to differentiate from each other, or simply suffered from a lack of consistent use of text. To address these problems, I created a set of emojis with different facial expressions, clear colors for each one (such as green for good and red for bad), added text labels to all of them, and incorporated short, lifelike animations—bringing the emojis to life.

Things to avoid:

Avoid using the same color for all options (e.g., all blue or gray).

Don't use facial expressions that are too plain, as it's harder to tell them apart.

Refrain from providing fewer than five options; maintain a balanced range for nuanced responses.

Things to adopt:

Color for Clarity: using green (good) and red (bad) colors for quick identification, leveraging common user knowledge.

Distinct Facial Expressions: Creating unique facial expressions for clearer representation.

Textual Complement: Short text enhances emoji intention communication and helps with accessibility and nuancing.

Creating the emojis

Designed five distinct faces in Adobe Illustrator with unique expressions and colors for enhanced distinction.

Imported and animated the emojis using After Effects to control each emoji and its elements, exporting them as a Lottie file for developers to integrate into the product.

For prototyping purposes, imported the animation into Figma (see example below).

Designing the dashboards

Moving into the design stage was the quickest part as the high-fidelity wireframes were very close to the finalized design.

User Flow - Employee Popup

While working on this section, I realized that it could be a good opportunity to explore how it could benefit both the IT admin and the employee in following up on actions. For example, this could be utilized to give employees the chance to solve problems without having to send an email to the help desk, asking them to open a support ticket, which could save time and effort for both parties.

Conclusion

My research revealed unexpected and exciting ways to assist both IT admins and employees. For instance, suggesting that employees open support tickets or providing them with relevant information could reduce troubleshooting time and enhance the digital employee experience, contributing to improved efficiency and job satisfaction for both users and IT admins.

These findings highlight the potential impact on company operations and employee contentment, resulting in the creation of a new user experience with a distinct and unique visual identity. Moreover, it has the potential to save time and money for the company as more issues could be resolved quickly, reducing costly working hours lost due to these issues."

I created a quick prototype to demonstrate how the user would see and interact with the popup, showcasing a dummy survey for the initial case study phase. It includes company branding (colors, logo, etc.) and features three basic questions indicative of what the IT admin's dashboard may include later.

Prototype of the user survey

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