UX Case Study: Helping Employees Find Balance

Faset is a product designed to help employees take advantage of their Lifestyle Savings Accounts. With Faset, users can earn Faset points and spend them at participating retailers in the physical, emotional, and financial wellness spaces. Additionally, they can expense approved items to their LSA accounts. At first launch it will be available in a Desktop responsive-web app

UX Designer - Ashley Bragg

UX Researcher - Raul Flores

Project Manger - Kayla Haselein

8 Weeks

Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSA) are a means for employers to help their employees pay for health and wellness expenses, and sometimes other costs that aren't typically covered under a group health plan. Employers who offer an LSA choose what expenses get reimbursed and how much each employee gets.

A product designed to help employees take advantage of their Lifestyle Savings Accounts. With Faset, users can earn Faset points and spend them at participating retailers in the physical, emotional, and financial wellness spaces. Additionally, they can expense approved items to their LSA accounts. At first launch it will be available in a desktop responsive web app

The current user experience for employees at mid to large-sized companies with Lifestyle Savings Accounts is not optimal. Employees are facing challenges in understanding the benefits and how to use their accounts within the physical wellness, emotional wellness, and financial wellness spaces. As a result, employees are struggling to achieve work-life balance and this is impacting their overall job satisfaction. To address this issue, there is a need to design an easier and more intuitive user experience that helps employees understand the offerings and how to use them effectively. This will not only improve the employee experience but also help companies to retain and attract top talent in a competitive job market.

Our goal was to design a product that enables employees at mid to large-sized companies to confidently use their Lifestyle Savings Accounts at participating retailers within the physical wellness, emotional wellness, and financial wellness spaces. The aim is to create an easier and more intuitive user experience that helps employees understand the offerings and how to use them effectively.

Conception

Research

Architecture

Design

Prototyping

Test & Iterate

Reflection & Next Steps

To start the design process, Raul and Kayla conducted user interviews with 6 employees from different companies with a variety of job roles. The interviews aimed to understand their current experience with utilizing their Lifestyle Savings Accounts and the challenges they face in doing so.

These interviews revealed that of the three categories of wellbeing we were looking at (emotional, physical, and financial) people ranked emotional wellbeing as their top priority. This insight was particularly helpful in guiding the focus of our design on opportunities in this wellness category. Additionally, 50% of users interviewed reporting feeling that their balance was off between work and life with work demanding too much of them compared to their life outside of work.

"We are not born into the world with money so it doesn’t matter much because you can always replace money unlike a body."

"When a company promotes working more they aren't invested in employees"

Additionally, Raul conducted a competitive analysis which dave us insight into this space and what others had successfully implemented.

They were more concerned about emotional wellbeing than physical and financial wellbeing

Barriers of time, access, and commitments prevent users from working towards their goals and interest outside of work

Users found it difficult to understand what is covered with LSAs and how to use them

Based on the user research, Kayla and I created three personas that represented the primary users of the product. For the purpose of the case study I will be focusing on one of these personas.

We then created empathy maps for each persona to better understand their experiences and to help remove our own experiences from the equation.

Next we developed user scenarios to better understand how our product could address user needs.

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We then developed user journey maps for each persona to illustrate the current experience and pain points for our personas. This helped us to identify areas of improvement and opportunities to create a better user experience.

Once we had completed our exploration and research we held a brainstorming workshop and utilized a dot voting system to decide on our product road map and features.

The following were our mush have features:

Community / Gamification

Personalized metrics

Search and find / scan it / favorite

Habit tracker

Personalized dashboard

These features would be added if time allowed:

App Integrations

Badges

Corporate dashboard

Onboarding Assistant

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Using the user scenarios, I then created wire flows, low fi and high fi wireframes to map out the user journey and product features. This allowed us to refine the product design and identify areas of improvement.

Wire flowLow Fidelity WireframesHigh Fidelity Wireframes

Before designing the high fidelity wireframes we decided as a group on the brand and identity of our solution. To ensure the product was accessible to all users, I followed accessibility guidelines and conducted color tests to make sure we were meeting WCGA standards.

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Kayla and I developed a prototype from our high fidelity wireframes. This allowed us to test the product with users in the next stage and make design changes based on their feedback.

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To evaluate the usability of the product, as a team we conducted usability testing with 6 new participants interviewing two people each. In these interviews we had the users complete tasks focusing on the three flows we built out. After these interview we sent them a survey to determine our The System Usability Score (SUS) which we used to measure the overall usability of the product. We earned a SUS score of 83 which is well above the 68 average of similar systems.

After our user interviews we came together as a group and identified theme in the research. We broke them down into the good the bad and the ugly.

What was working:

The aesthetic

The overall concept

Usability

What needed tweaking:

UI elements / unclear icons

Navigation / IA

Point system is unclear

What wasn't working:

Community / reviews

Difference between shop & expense

Faset point education

From this work we identified three changes to make for maximum impact:

Changes made:

Removed community in favor of personalization

Added My apps for integrations helping the user track their personal wellness goals

Surfaced personal stats and connected apps on dashboard

Changes made:

Split the shopping and expensing sections for better understanding

Renamed the two sections “Shop Benefits” and “Expense”

Built out the Expense flow with additional content to help walk the user through the flow

Changes made:

Gave the user Faset points for completing the onboarding experience. This will not only encourage them to earn more points but also education them on the feature

In first Faset point notification added new content to provide clarity on what they can do to earn and use the points

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In this design process we successfully built a solution to help employees take advantage of their Lifestyle Savings Accounts. With Faset, users can earn Faset points and spend them at participating retailers in the physical, emotional, and financial wellness spaces. Additionally, they can expense approved items to their LSA accounts.better way to make the most of LSA benefits. Users loved the concept and were wanting this to be a real product available to them.

The most challenging part of this project was letting go of the community feature when our users and data were telling us it didn't work. Ultimately, the goal of the work we do is to bring value to users and companies. If we hold onto ideas too strongly this gets in the way of this goal. I am glad we were able to find something that better supported the user's wellness journey with the app integrations. This feature was part of our nice to have list but through our work and conversations with users it became clear that it was on the user's must have list. In the end, we are not our users and we as designers must listen, empathize and advocate for the user's needs, not ours.

Testing - Conduct another round of usability testing to see if our changes are successful.

Develop - Bring Faset to developers to start building the product.

Features - Introduce more detailed features to Faset with the support of additional stakeholders.