summary

Bambee is a SaaS product that replaces internal HR for small and medium businesses. HR is more than just payroll and benefits, Bambee provides a technology assisted remote HR manager to businesses for as low as $99/month.

role

I was the second design hire, brought in to add additional UX and product expertise to the tech team. My day-to-day role was “full-stack” designer coupled with some product responsibilities as we didn’t have a dedicated product manager.

Highlights

• Redesigned Employee experience and conducted usability testing using Maze.

• Led greenfield project on adding Performance Reviews feature defining specifications, talking with stakeholders, and bringing the project through final visual design.

• Conducted regular customer interviews to identify app improvements.

• Regularly reviewed customer sessions using FullStory, made design updates, and passed issues directly to engineering.

• Made improvements to design system, taking advantage of new Figma features as they were released such as Auto-Layout.

• Designed web app for mobile as well as desktop, creating separate mocks to define the UX for each platform.

Employee App Redesign

summary

The Bambee web app serves both employers and their employees. This redesign is for the employee experience, which centers around signing documents and speaking with the company HR manager in-app. Below are some selected screens from this project.

scope + goals

We wanted to optimize two key workflows: (1) Signing documents and (2) Contacting your HR Manager. As a result, user research was focused around usability for these core workflows.

Usability Testing

To justify our UX decisions, I conducted multiple rounds of usability testing using Figma’s prototyping capabilities and the testing tool Maze. We tested the two critical activities in our app: (1) Signing policies and (2) Speaking with your HR manager.

v1 The first usability test I ran to test both of these functions indicated that both tasks needed improvement. Here are the results. For documents, there was quite a bit of drop-off with only 43% of testers succeeding. The issues were primarily on the document page and the signature panel. For chatting with the HR manager, I saw that users just were not able to find the HR manager chat bubble in the bottom right. I went ahead and tested some tweaks to try to address these issues.

v2 After some design changes, the second round of tests fully addressed issues with signing documents but only slightly improved the chat task. Here are the results. The document changes included: (a) removing “signature required” from the top of the document preview, because it was distracting users and no longer added value once viewing the document. (b) adding a “scroll to sign” hint in the bottom right of the document preview, to help guide users there more explicitly. (c) and removing the requirement for users to click the “draw signature” box in the popup since it’s non-intuitive in prototype form. With these results, we were ready to finalize this design for document signing

For HR chat improvements, I added the HR manager’s name along with their title to the bottom right chat bubble. This helped make it more explicit and prominent, but not enough to do better than a 17% success rate for testers.

v3 I noticed in v1 and v2 that users often looked to the left-hand nav on the HR chat task. So, I tried scrapping the bottom right chat bubble altogether and moved the HR manager to the top of the left nav. This ended up being much more successful, increasing the success rate to 57%. Here are the results.

v4 Though the left nav launcher tested significantly better, I was still concerned about having the chat area be launching in a separate place from the nav element. Also, this nav element behaves very differently from others (by launching a popup), so I wanted to try one more attempt at a bottom-right launcher to reduce inconsistency. I hypothesized that the issue was mostly with visual prominence, so I tried a chat bubble in purple to see if that fixed the issue. Here are the results.

Unfortunately, the v4 test was actually the most unsuccessful of any of the chat task versions, so my final decision was the keep the launcher in the left nav. However, since the success rate for v3 could still use improvement, I recommended that we include this as a part of a first-time product tour to help users get familiar with how to talk with their HR manager.

impact

As of this writing, this project is ready for dev but has not yet been released, so final result outcomes aren’t known.

Performance Reviews

summary

Before this project, the value of the Bambee web app for employers centered around communicating with your HR manager, drafting HR policies, and hiring / firing staff. The ask from the Product Team was to create a product for Performance Reviews, with the goals of providing a more structured way for employers to provide employee feedback and an additional sticky feature to keep users coming back. I had full ownership over this project and designed it end-to-end.

Selected designs for this new feature are shown below: