Project Overview

Background

ADP's Weekly Check-In App empowers managers and their reports with a simple, proven methodology to get aligned on near-term work, reflect on performance, and discuss each other's needs. 

We knew employees wanted to do more from their phone, but ADP's products were mostly built around the needs of desktop centric human resource practitioners. We were tasked to change that.

 My team was tasked with supporting our mobile strategy by creating the first app that was designed to do more than just a simple transaction such as asking for time off. Apart from serving employees better, this project would set the standard for mobile experiences for other domains such as payroll, time, and benefits. 

Known Challenges

• ADP's current app has navigation challenges that negatively impact usability

• Most existing interactions on the app relied on chatbots 

• There was no precedent for what "intra-app" navigation looked like

• Had to design components and patterns that could be leveraged to build other apps

• Certain aspects of the UX such as notifications, emails, and app's "Inbox" were not within our control

• Employees may not feel psychologically safe to share how they feel to their manager

• A large portion of our initial users were accustomed to a legacy version of this application 

Business Objectives

• Increase adoption of Weekly Check-In at ADP 

• Increase engagement scores within ADP 

• Minimize future engineering efforts by building reusable components

• Success rollout of Weekly Check-In with an external client

• Set the design standard for future mobile "apps within apps"

• Demonstrate how to design with an employee first mentality as oppose to HR practitioner centric approach 

UX Process

TIMELINE

Approx. 5 Months

MY ROLE

User flows

App UI

User Interviews

Workshop Facilitation

PROJECT

PARTNERS

Design System UX Leads

Talent Domain Dev. Team 

Product Owner, Talent 

Mobile Dev. Team

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How Might We...Navigation Workshop

Challenge

How do we accommodate an "app within an app" experience in an ecosystem designed around search and chatbot based experiences? 

Who Was Present?​

Product Owner, Talent

Design System UX Leads 

Director of Product, Mobile

The existing app’s information architecture and navigation paradigm did not support an app with rich functionality and its own navigation because the majority of user interactions took place through chatbots. Additionally, the only way to find and access the app was through “action links.”

I conducted a workshop to understand how the design systems and the mobile development team thought we should approach this limitation. The goal was to arrive at a shared understanding of the problem space, limitations, and goals of this project. Although we were building a new kind of app for talent, there were parallel objectives from a design system and mobile perspective because their long term goal was to build a "mobile tile designer" that would allow teams to quickly build mobile apps using pre-defined components.

Related Resources

User Interviews: Team Leads

Goals

• Gain insight into team rituals from the perspective of both the team lead and the team member. 

• Understand how the teams interviewed at ADP leverage weekly check-in in order to see if the product aligns with how work gets done. 

• Gather insights into the attitudes, perceptions, and pain points surrounding weekly check-ins both as a product and process. 

• Identify opportunities to streamline the UI and add value to both of our user types that can be incorporated into the re-design of weekly check-in. 

• Establish a benchmark for the current UX of TMBC’s weekly check-in. 

Participant Background

8 managers with at least 5 reports each from ADP (our future pilot client)

At least two years of management experience

Previous experience with TMBC's Weekly Check-Product

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We went offsite to another ADP office to conduct our interviews

with team leads from another business unit. I was accompanied by two developers and my product owner. While I facilitated the interviews, my team took notes and assisted with recording the sessions. Apart from the product owner, none of them

had attended research sessions before, so it was an eye opening experience 

for them to see how users interpret the product. 

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Key Findings 

There is a considerable gap between the kind of information the manager wants to extract from the check-in and what team members are providing that is largely due to poor onboarding and lack of contextual education

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Interpersonal trust, StandOut onboarding, team member usage, and manager usage determine how WCI is integrated into the team lead/member relationship. Four engagement models emerged from the study 

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Overall comments is the most common way to interact with weekly check-in data.

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Managers define how they engage with team members primarily based on tenure and personality while largely ignoring StandOut Strengths/Roles

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Managers found loves and loathes to be the most useful part of the check-in, but also the most underutilized

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Related Resources

Scope for v1

For Team Members

• Make it clear who they were sharing their check-in with if they had more than one team lead 

• Set expectation for how long checking in takes 

• Provide employees with a way there is something difficult they might want to communicate during their 1:1s 

• Without having to write it down 

For Managers/Team Leads

• Provide them with a low threshold way of aligning with team members on priorities

• A more personalized nudge feature that includes adoption trends at the individual level 

• At a glance see how many priorities and needs each team member has 

• Understand their teams adoption to identify performance or sentiment trends

UX Metrics📈

• Achieve 50% adoption during ADP internal PILOT (55,000 users) 

• Have at least 60% of team members report that they connected with their manager about their needs and priorities in the past week 

• 90% check-in open rate 

• Have 50% of managers respond with agree/strongly agree to the statement, "Weekly Check-in gives me insights into my team I ordinarily would not have." 

v1

Team Member Experience

A simple way to achieve alignment with your team lead, voice your needs, and drive your own development, all from your phone. 

v1

Manager/Team Lead Experience

A simple way to gain transparency into the priorities, needs, and sentiment of your team members. These insights can be used to drive more effective 1:1 conversations or possibly replace them occasionally.

What We Learned From Usability Testing

Once we developed a working version for both managers and team members, we recruited 5 managers and 10 team members (individual contributors) to go through the app in our production app.

We gathered a lot of helpful feedback, particularly from participants who had no exposure to the StandOut Weekly Check-In app on desktop. However, we could not act on all of it in time, so below are some notable examples of how the app evolved after this first round of usability testing. 

Results and Retrospective

Once we made improvements to the app over the course of a few sprints, we partnered with our Director of People Ops to assist with a town hall presentation, app accessibility,  and onboarding materials, to support the rollout of Weekly Check-In. After the announcement, 55,000 ADP employees switched to our application, many of which were exposed to Lifion (ADP's innovation lab) for the first time. 

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Outcomes and Results After 90 Days 

• Adoption went from 30% to 75% (not all on mobile) 

• Engagement Pulse results went up by 12% 

• The number of employees who feel their manager has visibility into their project work and needs went up by 28% 

• Managers shared positive anecdotes to HR 

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What Would I Have Done Differently? 

• Worked with machine learning and platform teams to prioritize the implementation of analytics earlier in the process 

• Proactively involve design systems team in more of the sync meetings to ensure alignment and get input on visual design choices

• Advocated for more time to enhance the team lead experience.

• Done more individual exploratory work on solutions to navigation challenges instead of relying heavily on unanimous consent and abstract solutions done in a workshop 

• Although HR and I were both invested in the success of the Weekly Check-In rollout, I would have worked closer with HR analyst to create a custom dashboard for the internal PILOT since HR metrics don't exactly mirror the UX metrics we had for the product.  

• Concept test earlier with our team member user type

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