Desiging an AI powered recognition and rewards Solution
Madukwe Kenneth Obinna
Client
During my time at Brave Achievers USA, I had the opportunity to lead the research, creation, and design of a user-friendly AI-driven rewards and recognition platform. This effort sought to empower employees by enabling rewarding experiences and incentives through the accumulation of points in our system's rewards program. This project is subject to a stringent NDA, thus exhibiting design screens and solutions is not permitted. You can contact me if you are willing to sign an NDA, and I will guide you through my design approach, screening, and psychology.
Research and defining the product
To commence the project, we convened a brainstorming session to outline our problem statements, guided by insights from the product owners. They emphasized the need for an AI-driven platform facilitating peer recognition and self-rewarding mechanisms.
Following this, we individually articulated the problems we aimed to address in concise sentences. Subsequently, through collaborative discussion, we identified common themes and deliberated on potential solutions. I was then tasked with conducting a competitive analysis of analogous platforms to benchmark industry standards and identify avenues for improvement.
In the subsequent meeting, I presented a comprehensive spreadsheet outlining the features of the top 8 similar products. The team deliberated and selected features to integrate into Podium. Additionally, I was assigned to craft personas and archetypes to delineate our target user demographics and define our unique selling points.
To refine the personas, I collaborated with my project manager to develop a survey aimed at understanding the preferences of employees and organizational leaders regarding recognition and rewards. The survey yielded valuable insights, highlighting a preference for experiential rewards over material items and shedding light on the challenges faced by HR managers in remote working environments.
Subsequently, I formatted the research data, visualizing it through MS Excel and Power BI to facilitate comprehension for the team. Based on these findings, I delineated two user categories: organization executives and employees. Furthermore, our research underscored the scarcity of experience-based rewards in existing programs, leading us to prioritize this feature in our product.
In the ensuing meeting, I presented the research findings, which were well-received by the team. I then proceeded to design user journey maps and a site map in the form of low-fidelity wireframes, which were subsequently reviewed and approved for the development of our MVP.
As a follow-up, I was tasked with conducting interviews with employees, organization heads, and HR managers to further refine our understanding of user needs and expectations.
Design Process
The team chose agile as the framework to guide product development; meetings were held on Mondays to brief team members on their weekly tasks; on Wednesdays, we had quick 30-minute sync ups, which team members used to get feedback on pain points in their work; and on Fridays, screens, prototypes, and designs were presented and reviewed by stakeholders. We choose to construct this product as an MVP. All screens and flows have been produced, and usability testing have been successful, with an average score of more than 80%. The product is currently under beta testing to help guide the selection of its debut features.
Conclusion and Impact
Braveachievers and GoCreate USA provide global boot camps to improve the quality of Product Designers available to businesses and organizations. This is a difficult undertaking, as it is nearly impossible to keep track of all pupils' and employees' development and appropriately reward work completed.
The company previously used a simple CMS site built on Bubble, which required continuous manual upgrades and provided a poor user experience for managers and executives.
The newly designed product allows HR managers to seamlessly integrate with products such as Azure DevOps, Microsoft Teams, and Uber to ensure proper task/work item tracking, seamless employee population updates, and seamless transportation rewards to their entire workforce through a single product. Project stakeholders were pleased with the prototype, and we moved on to beta testing, where our average usability score was 84.7% when evaluated with HR managers and employees.
