Modernizing employee engagement & social impact programs for HR teams
As the lead designer, I spearheaded the strategic vision for Epoch, aiming to revolutionize employee engagement and social impact programs by addressing HR challenges with a centralized, user-friendly platform.
EPOCH is a startup employee engagement platform for companies helping increase social impact and cross-functional connections. EPOCH partners exclusively with top community organizations, personally curates relevant opportunities to employees, and handles logistics end-to-end to put together an event for the workplace.
Before Epoch, HR teams often struggled with a fragmented approach to managing employee engagement and social impact programs. They were burdened with the tedious task of juggling multiple tools for event planning, communication, and reporting. The lack of a centralized platform made it difficult to track the impact of events, measure employee engagement, and demonstrate the value of these initiatives to stakeholders. Additionally, manual data entry and reporting processes were time-consuming and prone to errors.
Challenge
HR teams spend a lot of time planning, tracking, and obtaining feedback from employees on corporate events. It is difficult to understand the effectiveness of corporate programs and initiatives, and the direct impact to employee engagement.
One of the primary challenges was designing a user interface that was both intuitive and powerful. I needed to balance the need for a simple and clean design with the complexity of the underlying features. Additionally, ensuring a seamless user experience across different devices, from desktop computers to smartphones, required careful consideration of responsive design principles.
The Approach
To design a responsive intuitive platform that streamlines the entire event planning process from beginning to end - an all-in-one employee experience platform. Adding new interfaces to the dashboard to improve workflow for the user. HR teams will use one tool to send communication, track attendance, and do reporting for all events, including social impact programs, hence cutting down on scattered workflow from having to use several tools. With the increasing usage of mobile devices and tablets, the platform needs to be responsive so the user can use it anywhere to check events, etc. at anytime.
I opted for a clean, minimalist design with a focus on readability and usability. The color palette was carefully chosen to evoke a sense of professionalism and approachability. I also prioritized a clear and intuitive information hierarchy, ensuring that the most important information was easily accessible. To ensure the platform’s effectiveness, I conducted multiple rounds of user testing with HR professionals. Based on their feedback, I iterated on the design, refining the user interface and optimizing the user experience.
Discovery Stage
My discovery stage was focused on the research which consisted of CC Analysis, looking at similar products already used by customers to get a better understanding of what I needed to create as a product. For events I looked at Eventbrite and Meetup. I also got a lot of insight into what was needed from one of Epoch's clients, North.
Stakeholder Engagement: To address these challenges, I conducted interviews with HR professionals, Event Planners & Coordinators, Community Engagement Managers, Engagement Specialists, Lead Recruiters and Talent Acquisition Managers. This ensured that our platform addressed real-world problems while aligning with the goals of key stakeholders such as North and Asana.
My main objective was to understand the current process for organizing corporate events, what metrics were being used to measure engagement and retention and the role and importance of social responsibility for retaining and engaging employees.
Design Leadership: I led a cross-functional team of designers, developers, and product managers to create a scalable platform. By combining user feedback with data-driven insights, we designed features that simplified workflows, such as event automation and calendar integrations.
Based on user feedback, I prioritized the creation of a dynamic dashboard and responsive mobile interface, ensuring seamless accessibility across devices.
Throughout the project, I mentored junior designers, fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration. I facilitated regular team workshops to ensure alignment with the project vision and streamlined communication between stakeholders and developers.
Key Insights
From the discovery stage I was able to identify who our personas would be (HR admins, Event Planners & Coordinators, Community Engagement Managers, Lead Recruiters and Talent Acquisition Managers and Employees) which lead to our initial mid-fi designs. From our interviews, we found that an intuitive dashboard was needed and that HR needed a better way of viewing events at a glance which led us to incorporating a calendar so that events can be seen easily and changes can be updated on-the-spot.
Social responsibility was another big factor for attaining and retaining employees. Along with this employee feedback was key to the success of a business.
I created a calendar, automatic reminders, customized messaging to attendees, and the ability to export feedback and reporting into Excel. I designed the dashboard with infographic metrics that related to the pain points of our users.
The UI Design Process
Below are UI design ideas presented as Inception Sheet, Mood Board, and Style Tile. The inception sheet was about professional, modern open space. The mood board captured the event planning process again with a feeling of open space and modern colour. The style tile presented neutral colours with the icons used throughout the design as well as the call to action (CTA) buttons used.
The Final Design
After the mid-fi design of the UX wireframes, UI is added to the final touches such as typography, colour and photos, etc. Here is a look at the final responsive design.
The Solution
To help the user spot trends from feedback, a HR dashboard collects the most relevant information — the reports and KPIs you actually care about — and organizes it on one screen. Charts, graphs, and meters visualize this information. Presenting the data graphically helps the user monitor everything at a glance and gauge company progress towards goals. The user can interact with HR dashboards to drill down when they need more information, and they can customize dashboards to see only high-priority objectives. The dashboard gives the option to create a company’s own events or populate with proposed events from Epoch.
For event planning, 'meet up' and 'eventbrite' were reviewed to find features that might be used for Epoch. Some user-friendly features they have are automatic reminder emails, exportable event details and data in excel and pdf, as well as responsive mobile screen. I incorporated these into the redesign.
The new dashboard has a Home, Events, Organizations, Reports, Analytics and Settings pages. The home is set up as a dashboard user interface with the nav bar to the left, however on the ipad and iphone the responsive navigation changes to a burger menu for better viewing of the pages. The home is an overview of volunteer hours, events held, and employee experience as well as upcoming events, top causes and top events.On the Events pages an admin user can create events, schedule events, see event details and see all upcoming, current, and past events as well as send reminders. The user can automate all communications and scheduling with no more jumping between web-up tools spreadsheets and docs just to set up a company social or training. The user can see custom reports to see who is attending and see how many hours that employee has volunteered to date and see what type of event is engaging for what time zones. The user can see what organization an event is for, what the social impact is as well as what the role and purpose is. HR can also filter and sort through the event list. The calendar view helps to see an overall view of events per month, week and day. Companies can now promote their events and send automated announcements through Slack, calendar, email, and newsletters using Epoch. Employees can now browse all internal events on the platform and they can also register with the calendar integration.
The Organizations pages allows users to see a list of organizations that the company works with through volunteer events.
Reports are downloadable and help track performance.
Analytics allows the user to see goals, uncover trends and anticipate future developments.
The Events Prototype
Conclusion
Under my leadership, the team successfully delivered a platform that reduced event planning time by 30% for North and significantly improved employee satisfaction at Asana and Udemy. The inclusion of advanced analytics empowered HR teams to make data-driven decisions, enhancing future engagement strategies.
By aligning user needs with business objectives, we delivered a platform that streamlined workflows, improved employee engagement, and provided measurable results for our client.
Responsive Web - Web design will render well on main devices used by HR — desktop and mobile screens. Reporting - HR can effectively evaluate and benchmark the current performance against corporate goals and are able to see more analytics and reports. Social Impact - HR can add non-profit partner profiles to the platform as well as non-profit partners provided by Epoch. HR users can understand company social impact through reports. Events - From creating events, tracking employee confirmations and attendance, and collecting employee feedback on corporate events, all is now usable by HR.
HR can track engagement, attendance, and feedback all in one place. Get reports and templated presentations to share with the company.
Improved employee satisfaction and engagement:
North was able to streamline their event planning process by over 30% using Epoch. By automating tasks like event creation, communication, and reporting, their HR team saved valuable time and resources. Additionally, the platform's analytics features enabled them to identify trends in employee engagement and make data-driven decisions to improve future events.
Asana reported a significant increase in employee satisfaction and engagement through the streamlined event planning and management process facilitated by Epoch. By centralizing communication channels and providing easy access to resources, Epoch empowered employees to actively participate in company culture and professional development opportunities.
Udemy experienced a significant increase in employee engagement and satisfaction by leveraging Epoch. The platform's intuitive interface and seamless integrations enabled employees to easily discover and participate in relevant events and programs. By centralizing communication channels and streamlining event management, Epoch empowered employees to actively participate in company culture and professional development opportunities.
Go to Epoch website here.
Since the Epoch platform design, Epoch now has new clients such as Salesforce, Reddit Inc., Asana, Udemy, Stack Overflow, Instacart, Zynga, Datadog. Hinge, Affirm, Miro, Glassdoor, and others.
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