Personal Growth Plan for Howamigoing
The project
Howamigoing is an employee-focused PSM (Performance Management System) platform. We designed a Personal Growth Plan feature within their current website to support employees in in creating, tracking, and achieving personal growth goals.
The challenge
The main goal of the project was to create a personal development plan based on the user and not the company. We wanted to encourage users to log into the platform more frequently, and to give them a personal development plan process that was more engaging, and less frustrating.
My Role
I was a User Experience designer in a team of 4 people (1 UI designer and 4 UX designers). During the 4 week project I was involved in the research, synthesis, ideation, prototyping and testing phases and, finally, preparing the deliverables handoff for the client.
The methods and the process
Our research story
Initial Research
Before starting the project, we barely knew what Performance Management System software was. We needed to understand the product, the context, and identify key trends and insights that will help us find our design solutions.
In order to do this we undertook an intensive period of desk research, talking to SME’s, competitor analysis (both direct and indirect) and interviewing users of howamigoing and their competitors.
We found out that…
➔ Company-centred development plans rather than people-centred
➔ Live feedback features and Learning Management System integration
➔ Goals that are achievable, progressive and shareable
➔ Goals that can be tracked and measured
Users think PDP should be voluntary and driven by user’s curiosity.
Users think that Personal Development Plans are business oriented and prompted by superiors.
Users said they like customisable features.
Narrowing down our research
Defining our users
We ran several affinity mapping sessions in order to identify trends, insights and problems that users could experience. We came up with 2 different employee profiles:
“Personal Growth plans should be voluntary and thriven by my curiosity”
He wants to be excellent in his job and wants to keep growing. He is also a manager of a 4 people team.
“I don’t like the idea of Personal Development Plan. It sounds like I could fail”
She has been working in a company for 10 yers and she feels stuck in her job. She needs a professional motivation to feel fulfilled.
What are the problems we are trying to solve?
Identifying the problem
Using the trends and insights found in our research, we outlined the problem our users were experiencing:
We wanted to find a solution to encourage users to create and follow a personal development plan with advice from a mentor, so that they can learn skills that will enable them to engage and grow in their roles, benefitting both themselves and their companies.
Following their journey
We ran a workshop with users to identify pain points they were experiencing. We then used this information to define solutions that we could implement in our design.
Let’s find solutions!
Conceptualising
We ran several brainstorming and sketching sessions, and after testing the concepts with potential users we came up with three viable alternatives.
Concept 1
Daily pulse check to track your feelings
Users can select a feeling, have the option to write the reason why, and associate it with a specific goal in their plan.
It enables the user to track emotional well-being and chart feelings periodically.
It can promote relevant actions as well as allowing other team members to help or recommend advice.
The feedback
It helps the relationship between employees.
“I don’t want people to see what I’m entering. I’d rather do it on my phone”
Most users felt that it was a great feature, but there was a concern that it could be used negatively in some company cultures.
Concept 2
How to set up a goal for your teams
How am I growing: your library of goals
The personal growth plan feature for Howamigoing would be How am I growing.
Turning personal development plan into a more casual exercise in team building, knowledge sharing and longer-term goals.
Library of goals (both personal and professional): goals created by you, others suggested for you by the platform, other users suggestion and manager goals.
Goal creation process: assign time, tasks, mentor to follow your goal, goals buddies and skills achieved.
Being able to follow the process of the tasks done in a goal.
Possibility to create goals for you or for someone in your team.
The feedback
Users loved the idea of library goals, but not sure how that can be implemented.
Liked the idea that people could use goals to train each other in their companies.
Liked that we could maybe add media, classes, reading materials to create learning goals.
Concept 3
Rewards & recognitions for achieving your goals
Allows users entering the platform regularly. The more interaction completing tasks, setting and accomplishing goals, giving feedback to others… the more rewards and recognitions you get.
Earn badges and changes your role status.
Shareable success with other users it makes the PDP more sociable.
Progress and rank you personal development plan to make you engaged with the platform.
The feedback
Turn the rewards into something tangible.
The achievements should be set or agreed by a manager or a team leader.
Users would log into the platform more often if the feature is gamified.
The solution
After validating the concept and receiving feedback from some users we put together the concepts in Howamigoing site and built the site map of Howamigrowing (the Personal Growth Plan section)
Wireframing
We created the prototype using Figma, since it allowed us working simultaneously.
Here are some wireframes of our prototype.
