Overview

Prompt

Career development and growth is highly sought after by young talent. These employees seek company cultures that value engagement, career growth, and instilling professional development.

How might we enhance career growth and encourage engagement between managers and employees?

Solution

Arise is a career growth application that enhances communication between managers and employees by encouraging regular performance feedback and goal-setting. This all facilitates a positive work environment and culture.

Market Research

When we first began the project, we were mainly interested in learning about how managers and employees exchanged feedback in a workplace setting. We found that there were a few pain point trends amongst 10 employees and managers from various sized companies we interviewed — feedback method, peer feedback, feedback requency, career growth, request difficulty.

We created user personas based on our interviewees to help with ideation and creation process.

Competitive Analysis

We took a look at existing HCM performance tracking software, such as Workday HCM and Lattice, and found that they lacked the push for consistent conversation surrounding professional development and career growth between managers and employees.

Insights

Amongst the growing number of pain points, we chose to focus on career growth. It is not discussed frequently, typically once a year, unless initiated by the employee. The ability to track progress over times makes it clear what the individual has achieved. Most managers feel it would be beneficial to be able to track this progress for company statistics. Encouraging progressional development allows managers to check in with their employees more personally.

Process

Ideation

By pushing increased communication surrounding career growth, managers and employees will be encouraged to have more regular performance feedback, goal setting and discussions on skill development. This all facilitates managers and employees to align their goals to create a more productive and positive work environment. The main features we thought of were goal setting, skill development, career trajectory, and facilitating feedback.

User Flow

The application has two perspectives, the manager and the employee’s perspective. We created a few user scenarios to help map out the product.

Using the user flows, we created an information architecture diagram to map the entire application

Wireframes

After figuring out the information architecture, we got pencil and paper and sketched out what each page would look like. We then created mid fidelity wireframes on Figma.

User Testing

After creating high fidelity designs using our teammate’s branding, we conducted user testing with an employee and a manager to get feedback on our application. We made sure to ask the user to do tasks and asked questions to aide us in figuring out if

• The application is easy to use and navigate
• How easy it is to create and give feedback to goals
• The effectiveness of skills and certifications
• The effectiveness of the career analysis feature

General feedback was positive, they found the application features to be interesting and useful but gave suggestions on improving the skills portion and making UI areas more intuitive.

Interested in more details about our process?

View our full documentation here.