Anatomy of a User Experience TransformationJune 24th, 2010 |
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When you lead the market in customer satisfaction, and are chosen by customers for product “ease of use,” making overhauls to your products’ user interface requires some very thoughtful planning and consideration. For Halogen, when it came to overhauling our UI and overall user experience, we focused on ensuring that the suite was both more usable and learnable for every single type of user.
Jim Holincheck at Gartner noted in our announcement: “HCM software faces a unique challenge in that it is used by every employee in the organization. Usability and point of need training can make a critical difference in the successful implementation of talent management and other HCM software.”
So we kept this as a guiding principle as we began this project, and made sure that we could deliver on the next few items too…
Simple and Powerful
This is and always has been our product mantra and we stuck to it! The UI is simple and clean, providing fingertip access to the most important resources required to manage talent.
Thoughtful - No Gimmicks!
We wanted to improve on what customers already loved. So we brought in a bunch of design experts and did rounds and rounds of rigorous usability testing – both among our customers, and even among people who had never used talent management software. We tested the design, we tested the product and then we tweaked it some more so that our usability rating went way beyond average – to above the 80th percentile.
It’s About More than Just a Facelift – it’s About Optimizing the User Experience.
Sure – it has to look slick – and professional – but looks are just the tip of what is important. So what else did we hope to achieve:
- “Learnability” was key here. We kept the color palette neutral and minimal and used it strategically – each of the colors used means something to the user. You’ll see that the iconography is minimal too, not cute, not flashy, but uses best practices from the consumer social networking world, so it’s familiar to most users – and suits a global audience.
- “Personalization” is also something you’ll see is very different from other applications you might be used to. You can set your views of things to see exactly what you want or need to see. Whether you’re a novice or a ‘super user’, task oriented or a ‘big picture’ person, you can use the filters and personalization to show you the right amount of information – when you need to see it. And the software will remember your settings and take you back to your customized set up every time.
- Efficiency. It’s no secret that we’re all about making our customers’ lives easier. For managers, access to all the information they need to manage performance is at most two clicks away. We were thoughtful in how we delivered the information and used best practice UI techniques like jump lists so that users get the right information at the right time. Hey, it also expands or conforms to your screen size, or can fill multiple screens if that’s how you work.
The early reaction to the new User Experience in V10 of our Talent Management Suite has been nothing short of ‘wow’. Not because of cute cartoonish icons or flashy spinning baseball cards. In fact you won’t see any of those. The ‘wow’ reaction comes from the thought put into solving talent management workflow and business problems – and the ‘clean, simple – and powerful’ we promised to deliver on.
Job Description Builder – Bringing Clarity to “What is it I’m Supposed to Do Here?”
There are literally hundreds of customer enhancements incorporated into Version 10, and lots of improvements in each of the suite modules spanning performance, compensation, succession and learning. But one of the coolest additions to this release is our Job Description Builder.
All too often employees sit down to a performance review, or development planning session and they’re confused by the feedback from their manager, because they were not aware that a particular competency was relevant to their job. Not to mention the all too familiar phrase heard by HR and management… “that’s not in my job description” when asking certain team members to perform a given task or role.
There is no doubt that a job description should be a foundational tool for managing employee performance. Employees must know their job responsibilities and clearly understand what’s expected of them, (and for healthcare organizations, they are required to by the Joint Commission). But many companies struggle with a lack of centralization and consistency of job descriptions – this makes the descriptions both obsolete and meaningless to employees. Often job descriptions may exist within the company, but they aren’t consistent or standardized in terms of the information they capture. Job Description Builder changes all that.
Unlike other job description management systems, Job Description Builder allows you to put any type of useful information into your job description. No limitations. It also lets HR control the process for creating and updating job descriptions, ensuring clarity and understanding among all employees.
What else does this mean for the user? It means your organization can seamlessly link job responsibilities to performance management, so that any updates to a job description automatically flow through to the associated performance appraisal. That’s going to save time - and help drive consistency between expectations and assessments. And it’s that type of benefit that supports your engagement efforts!
There’s also a special benefit for healthcare organizations since this process helps them more easily meet and demonstrate Joint Commission compliance. Automating processes to ensure job descriptions are reviewed periodically, and ensuring employees are aware of job responsibilities with automated employee review and sign off, is exactly what the Joint Commission expects for compliance.
Thank You…
I’ve said a lot today – I think you can tell I’m pretty excited about this latest release. Many thanks to our customers, who so graciously spent their time in beta and usability testing during the development of Version 10. We couldn’t have done it without you!
We’ve also been lucky enough to share a sneak peak of this release with some great HR analysts, media and bloggers over the past few weeks, so we wanted to make sure that our readers got the same overview. And more importantly, we wanted to give you an understanding of our design philosophy and just what was involved in delivering on the great user experience and fantastic functionality of Version 10. If you’re at the SHRM Annual Conference in San Diego next week, drop by and visit us at booth 1439, and we’ll let you have your own up close and personal look!
Tags: employee performance appraisal, performance management, talent management |
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