BRIDGE ENGAGE is an engagement platform within a suite of people-first tools that helps businesses solve problems by surveying, measuring, and acting on employee sentiment. Leaders in Human Resources create and send engagement surveys, then measure the results against business goals. Managers get a view into their team’s sentiment, giving them the data and tools to enact change at the team level. Other parts of Bridge surface team performance metrics already, so creating a solution around team sentiment was a very natural progression.

I was the sole product designer for Engage, managing customer and product research, synthesis, validation, and the final UI.

Engage is a large application with touch points across an entire organization. So let’s look at one of its differentiators—the data analysis and display for a manager.

A CHALLENGE THAT FREQUENTLY APPEARED in interviews with HR leaders was measuring performance at the team level. HR teams already measure results and tailor tools or processes toward strengths or weaknesses in the organization, but don’t have a way to distill the information down to specific teams. In our early conversations with leaders, making survey results available to individual managers resonated. One HR Director described the ideal tool as one that “allows managers to help themselves because we’d like to step away from HR just rolling changes down from on high.”

Feeling we’d proven enough value to an organization, we continued with contextual inquiry with managers. We did this knowing already what sort of data a manager could possibly see, but we wanted to work to find the best way for a manager to convert data to action.

We also asked our HR interview partipants to stack rank a group of factors, and ‘Manager Relationship’ consistently towards the top.

Manager Interviews (sample)

Research Informs Execution

WE EXPLORED SEVERAL DIRECTIONS for the factor chart shown on the manager’s page, including a stacked bar graph, a modified violin plot, and the box and whiskers plot. Prototyping and testing were crucial to success and monumentally helpful in validating how we showed team data.

Of course not everyone is a data expert, nor should they have to be. And Engage has a lot of charting! So we produced helpers like this one for every chart type.

Our decision to use the box and whiskers plot came towards the end of our research, when some of the managers in the test group began to offer theories about the cause of some of the data in our prototypes. Managers were seeing the team average and could see where someone on the team felt successful/comfortable and where another felt challenged/not supported.

Customers in our early beta program meant we could look through real-world feedback on our design decisions to learn from challengers that managers faced and how they might steer conversations with their teams. The line marking company average, for example, was a customer suggestion. One of their managers pointed out that they would like to see how they compared to other managers in the organization. We updated our prototypes, tested it amongst another group of managers, validated it, and put it into production.

We also found that the factor scores themselves are only good enough to point managers in the right direction. But success is measured in action. Without specific training, for example, what do you do with a low alignment score? Clicking through any of the factor scores reveals which questions are behind the scores.

Course recommendations from the Bridge LMS show courses in the area of a manager’s weakest factor scores. The team knew that the tool is only as good as it is useful, so we planned future work around pushing success stories into conversations between managers and team members.

BASED ON A TEAM’S specific scores, Engage recommends content from Bridge Learn to the manager. In its MVP form, recommendations are centered around the lowest factor scores. We completed the integration with the LMS with a future eye towards pushing recommendations for high and low scores to individual 1on1 conversations between the manager and their reports. Because along with the low scores, managers should be talking with their teams about their high scores, too. The positive feedback in sharing successes is as important as knowing where a team needs help. Some of our interviewees—especially first time managers—weren’t always sure how to work on team culture or dynamics. Nudging people towards best practices was something that came up in HR leader conversations, and they loved it.

THE MOST VALUABLE DATA in Engage is what employees actually say, rather than their numerical scores. Managers can see what their team said, but only if enough of their team answered. Anonymity is the most crucial part about honest feedback, so Engage hides comments from certain reports if the amount of respondents is less than a client-configured number. But rather than simply hide the comments altogether, we give a reason why the data isn’t there. A number of managers said that it would motivate them to encourage their team to fill out the survey in its next iteration (quarterly, annually, etc.).

An example of what a manager might see. Several helpful features are present here that did not make it into the MVP—comment clustering, removal of anonymity (user-selected), recoding comments, and the ability to star or bookmark comments.

AS WE APPROACHED the end of our MVP, we continued to test, looking less towards feature input and instead towards customer outcomes. Six of our ten beta clients rolled out an engagement survey, and we combed through results across manager roles. Open communication between the client and our team let us also see into the process and training plans those organizations used to roll out engagement scores for teams.

We built the core Engage product in 12 months. I’m highlighting one of the more challenging reports here, and I have also written about one of our other essential features in Comment Analysis for Bridge Engage.

The Figma prototype. Click around — these screens are almost exactly the same as how we prototyped with clients and delivered to the engineering team.
If ad blockers are disabling the Figma embed, see it here: Engage Manager Dashboards.