Modernizing employee engagement & social impact programs for HR teams
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.
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.
Our Approach
To design a responsive intuitive platform that streamlines the entire event planning process from beginning to end. 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 work platforms. 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.
Discovery Stage
Our discovery stage was focused on our research which consisted of CC Analysis, looking at similar products already used by customers to get a better understanding of what we needed to create as a product. For events we looked at Eventbrite and Meetup. We also got a lot of insight into what was needed from one of Epoch's clients, North. We conducted interviews with HR professionals, Event Planners & Coordinators, Community Engagement Managers, Engagement Specialists, Lead Recruiters and Talent Acquisition Managers.
Our main objectives were 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.
Key Insights
From the discovery stage we were able to identify who our personas would be 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.
We created a calendar, automatic reminders, customized messaging to attendees, and the ability to export feedback and reporting into Excel. We 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. We 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 the user can create events, see event details and see all upcoming, current, and past events. The user can see who is attending and see how many hours that employee has volunteered to date. 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.
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
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.
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