SKOACH — chatbot

New Dashboard Design — Case Study

Skoach is a chatbot applied to the HR sector, which, based on behavioral studies, creates automatic challenges in the form of games, to promote employee habits around feedback, autonomy, and leadership.

The whole interaction is made through Skoach’s chatbot integrated into Slack or Teams, which are platforms that most companies already use in their daily lives.

After an initial analysis, a plan of challenges is defined to be applied by each user.

Overview

My role: as a UX/UI Designer

• Conduct research
• Concept Sketch
• Conduct tests with users
• Wireframes and Prototype design

Duration: 4 days

Problem: The problem brought by my clients was that, since there is no monitoring system, people sometimes feel lost on the way. They don’t have a sense of journey, and sometimes, they are confused about where they are and where they’re heading to with the program. This could cause less engagement after a while.

Goal

• Creating a new Dashboard for users
• Promote engagement to the program

The protagonist

Meet Ana Sofia!

She’s a 36 years old Content Marketer at a Computer Software company.

Process

Discovery

I’ve kicked off by creating an initial CSD matrix to gather all the information I had at that moment from the brief and my first assumptions and doubts.

My main objectives with research were:

• To find out what is the impact of the program on users’s life.
• Users motivations and pain points during the program
• To find out if having a Dashboard was relevant or not for them to keep engaged in the program
• The main advantages of having a Dashboard

Each one of these objectives was reached through 3 main steps: Competitive Analysis, a general survey, and interviews with current users.

A general survey was sent through channels with potential users so that I could get some ideas of what people expect from a self-improvement program and how important it would be to have a Dashboard available to keep track.

Gathering the results and analyzing them through an Affinity Diagram to see patterns showed us that:

With this information in hand, I just needed to, now, have a more specific understanding from potential users and Skoach users. The actual situation left only the option to reach them 💻 remotely, which was not a barrier at all. Through the interviews, users gave me a lot of good insights and clarified what were their pain points along the program.

Motivations:

• 💞Feel valued once the company was investing in their self-improvement
• ↗️Seeing the challenges as an opportunity to grow
• 👫🏽The fact that the challenges were practical and they could integrate with others

Pain points:

• ⏱ Time management. People find it hard to find time to fit the challenges into their schedule
• 📈 Users find it hard to keep track of their real progress
• 🤔 Sometimes they feel lost on the way because they can’t remember the objectives of each challenge
• 📐 📏They cannot measure their improvement

Competitive Analysis

Skoach main competitors are Humu and Degreed.

Market Positioning Chart

Analyzing their visual and the dashboard itself, we can see that Humu has a lighter amount of information and the visual is cleaner and more playful, while Degreed has a more traditional visual and lots of information.

I’ve identified that none of them brings the gamification vibe to the dashboard, which gave me the perfect desired position to place Skoach’s new Dashboard. A more playful and gamified experience to engage the user.

Define

At this point, we needed to narrow our objective to start the Ideation step. The How might we…? method helped me again to better define the challenge:

Information Architecture

Content was kept to a minimum to keep things simple — there are three main sections: Home, Profile, and Extra Material.

• On the Home Screen of the Dashboard, the information users put as more important are displayed at a glance.
• Profile page brings information about objectives and user personality traits.
• The Extra Learning section provides a deep dive into the subjects with extra resources.

User Flow / Context

Remember Ana Sofia?

So, it is the second Friday of her individual phase of the program. She has selected the skills she wants to improve and she has done the first challenge already. As you remember, she has now to deliver her second challenge. After this, she is going to receive the first report she was anxious about and collect her first Badge!

Ideation step

Concept Sketching

I kept a few main considerations in mind while ideating for the concept:

• 📄 Users can scan the most relevant information at a glance
• ⏱ Since users do the challenges during weekdays, and they don’t have much time to wast, no decision making is needed from the user along the process and there are no inputs besides the Menu.
• 👩🏽‍🏫 Small tip messages are displayed to help users become familiar with the structure of its content.
• 🙋🏼‍♀️🕹🌄‍The tone (sense of movement given by different activities such as climbing a mountain or camping), rewarding system (with badges), and expectation (with information displayed only at specific moments) highlight the gamification aspect of the Dashboard

Prototype

Midi-fidelity prototype

On the midi-fidelity prototype, I’ve played a little with some animations to give it more life to the Dashboard. Here, I could design my flow and get ready to validate it with the usability test.

Validation

Usability testing

After testing it with 6 potential users, I could validate my flow and had to do only a few adjustments before starting the high-fidelity.

UI

For the UI elements, I’ve picked two main inspirations: Headspace and Fabulous. They are both apps created to help people tracking and changing habits, and they entice the users along the path to self-improvement through illustration, animation, and a playful tone that delight the user, prompting them to accomplish tasks. Colorful cards display the user’s goals and their completion.

This is a sneak peek of my Style Guide with some of the elements I’ve designed to give the playful tone.

And now, the final result star! ⭐️

Key Learnings and Surprises

For my conclusion, I’m gonna highlight the amazing experience that was working with Skoach 💕. Rita was totally receptive and gave me all the support I needed from the business side. Another glows of this beautiful journey, and I have so much to thank, was that working by yourself could sometimes be very hard, but everything gets lighter and funnier with a 🧑🏼‍🤝‍🧑🏼 👬🏼 👭🏼 👫🏼 little help from my friends (and teachers, that I can also call friends)

My main learning from this week was that: there’s no such a thing as too much 📚 research. This is never too much! To create a good design you need to know the right questions and to get the right answers. 📂Documentation is also CRUCIAL. Keep all findings and insights, and inspirations. Even the smallest things, in an organized way, are not only time-saver, but a lifesaver I would say.