Mood is a human resources tool focused on employee feedback

 
 

One fine day HR came to us in the design team with a problem. They were struggling to promote engagement and feedback amongst the development office that was located in a different country of the company’s HQ. Their attempts to live town hall sessions proved to be a failure. Often times, the employees felt shy to speak up and the engagement wasn’t happening. At the same time, the same employees would chat more freely on a one-on-one basis with HR or via chat with their peers.

With that realization in mind HR wanted to move its efforts online. Together, we started conceptualizing a tool that employees could check-in everyday to say how are they feeling in a quick or more extensive manner, share their thoughts with HR and send their kudos to anyone in the company. And like that, MOOD was born.

 
 

As the UX designer in the project, I worked together with a UI designer, the HR team and a team of 3 developers which, luckily, were also part of the user base of MOOD. After many meetings to understand the needs of both user personas we agreed on these requirements:

 

1. How do I feel today

Here the employee would say how they are feeling in a daily basis. Should have a fast option and the possibility to add more contextual information.

 

2. Kudos

Here the employee would send a thank you, well done or congratulations message to one or more people in the company.

 

3. Share your thoughts

Here the employee would send their thoughts, requests and aspirations to HR.

4. HR dashboard

The HR team would have a separate dashboard where they could see the overall feeling of the employees on each given day, their mood messages and their thoughts messages.

 

5. Reminders

The employees should get email notifications if they didn’t login in a while. Also, they should get a notification when someone sends them a Kudo.

 

Each of the first 3 requirements were split in the menu. The main screen prompts you to perform the first fast interaction while encouraging to give a more extensive answer and shows a preview of the next feature (kudos). All messages screens have the option to send the message anonymously.

The requirements for the HR board were split into 2 screens. The main screen has the graph of the office mood and the mood messages they wrote. The second screen have the messages sent straight to the HR inbox. Would work pretty much the same as an email inbox, loading the latest one in the screen and the older ones on the side. There’s possibilities to reply to the message, search through messages and notifications of new, old and replied messages.

The app would also send an email whenever the employee received a kudo and after a certain period of inactivity. Both emails prompted the employee to get back in the tool. On the top menu of the app was also a notification icon where the employee could check the same information.

Examples of the final design.

Last considerations

While discussing the wireframes and final design with the stakeholders, it became clear to the design team some aspects we needed to achieve to make the app successful:

  1. The app shouldn’t feel like another work task
    We made the mood task super simple (choose your mood based on emojis) and the focus of the first screen. Only after choosing a mood you’d get the text field to expand on it if you wanted to. With that, it wouldn’t crowd the screen and look like too much to do.
    We also decided to move away from the company branding as well as adding emojis, animations and a more personal tone of voice.

  2. We needed to create a sense of community
    We decided to make the kudos available for everyone to see. the profiles of people would have their company picture and names.

  3. But respect their privacy

    All thoughts and kudos had the possibility to be sent anonymously. The mood choice would always be anonymous as a way to encourage the user to at least use this feature.

  4. More engagement
    We decide to add link from the mood screen to the kudos one. Also, we had links to add kudos and mood on the email notification to encourage the user to go back to the app.

Mood app was designed by me and Marjolein and developed by Javi, Pedro and Fernando (with the help of HR team).