A Coolr employee engagement app

The Situation:

Tech start-up Coolr was entering the employee engagement market with a multi-platform app that facilitated meaningful communication between leaders and teams. As one of the original contributors to Coolr, I was tasked with the development and design of the app's user experience and interface. Working closely with our product manager and engineers, we mapped out the app's architecture, created wireframes and functional prototypes, and translated them into a consumer-facing app.

The Strategy:

Utilizing market research from our Human Insights team, we began to identify the problems leaders faced in their daily workplace. A major theme kept popping up in our research which we chose to focus on: meaningful and bite-sized communication.

Leaders were never sure their important communications were being seen by their teams. Email was generating a lot of noise and was easily ignored with no feedback on whether it was read. Coolr would provide a way for leaders and their teams to connect with each other and their organization via quick, media rich posts. As connection became more meaningful, employee engagement increased. Ultimately, use of the Coolr app would help foster company culture and increase productivity.

The Solution:

Working in an agile environment, the app design was iterative. We began with wireframes to determine user flow and then walked through each stage to find friction points in the user experience before building the prototype. Once we had a working foundation, Coolr partnered with targeted enterprise customers in a closed preview program. Utilizing feedback and user data from the preview customers, Coolr's product evolved.

For Coolr, I combined a polished yet refreshingly colorful aesthetic that blended with both iOS and Android UI. Customers were able to tailor the app to their brand with features such as logo placement, values alignment, and social media feed integration.

Leader Assist posts were Coolr generated content that was targeted to each leader or team and helped facilitate conversations within the app. Notifications from Leader Assist posts generated app opens and engagement.

Leading research has shown that recognizing an employee for the work they've done is a huge motivator. The Recognition feature allowed coworkers to recognize each other within the app and provide visibility within the company. Recognition could be via a quick text post or via a video recording that would show up in the company feed.

Finally, an employee directory would allow coworkers to learn more about each other and served as a place for contact information and quick messaging.