Building Workflows for HR & Workplace Comms @ Assembly
Empowering low-tech HR professionals to create & customize automated culture and comms initiatives.
Objective
User, Product, and Business Goals
As a user and an HR professional…
The culture at my company is unique and changing — I want to easily create culture and communication initiatives that align with my company's goals and needs.
The product should…
Alleviate tool fatigue & context switching at work by providing a place to build, customize, and consolidate culture and communication tools through one flexible, easy to learn interface.
Role and Responsibilities
As the sole product designer at Assembly, I led all research, design, prototyping, and testing responsibilities. I worked with the CPO and PM to consider feature requirements as well.
Research and Requirements
Before committing to requirements, I sent out a survey to our current members and potential customer base and asked: "Which of the following types of workplace communication and collaboration do you find most important to your productivity and success?"
Feedback, Weekly reviews, and Weekly 1:1s came in at the top 3 overall, with Leadership Announcements and Surveys being of top concern for our likely buyers.
We set out to design a workflow builder that could handle all of these use cases and allow for creativity on use cases we had yet to think of. The goal was to create an experience that felt lightweight but robust.
Initial Exploration and Wireframing
Attempted multi-step modal given these benefits:
Easy to get to from anywhere
Low commitment to encourage exploration and play
However, these wireframes showed me that this experience was too complex for a modal
After some more research, we found that the key action that should be lightweight is actually answering a form
Inspiration and Initial Direction
Inspired by other flexible workflow builders like Zapier, I used a full screen takeover with strategic opening/closing to focus your eyes on the most important information, while still offering you an overview of your progress
Does this seem like too many steps? I agree! Stay tuned to see how I fixed that.
In Production: Version 1
Workflow creation was praised as intuitive and flexible, and companies that adopted workflows saw 20% more engagement, and reported higher satisfaction with the platform
We were able to run user testing sessions with our first version in production - I watched multiple hours of guided and unguided sessions of users creating workflows
There's always room for growth! What did I learn from V1?
Some steps are too committal, and the less steps, the better.
HR professionals want to collaborate with colleagues and make sure they know how their workflow will look and feel to their end users. We moved sharing out of the editor.
Not everything needs to be Named, use common language!
Terms like "Trigger" and "Participants" and even "Flow" had to be explained and learned, moving to more common language helped users pick up the skills faster.
Enhance the content building experience
Users starting creating use cases beyond what we had even expected — especially long, thoughtful surveys. I needed to add more power-user functionality to enable our users to create more use cases with ease.
Enhancements: Version 2 - Simple, effective, and familiar
Content building
Utilize a chart-like UI to surface the most important actions: setting a question title, its required status, and the question type.
Second order functionalities (re-ordering, duplication, deletion, and advanced settings) are accessible on hover or by keyboard.
Research on previous iterations showed that open-ended questions were most popular in our system, which also require the least configuration.
Distribution and reminders
This version has been refined from a previously tested iteration to optimize for the most common use cases — forms that are open at any time, or forms that have a strict deadline.
I chose to use large radio button containers in the design to create a chunkier, more visually engaging interface that is able to unfold step-by-step.
Sharing: Balancing simplicity with flexibility
To support larger enterprises and save administrators time, the goal was to optimize sharing so that it could be set based on key enterprise information.
We needed to enable use cases like…managers in Los Angeles, excluding individuals, and adding departments, which required robust AND/OR logic
This version of sharing balances the simplicity of sharing models like Google Docs and blends it with automation.
Impact and Ongoing Efforts
These design changes have led to a 10% boost in workflow completion, and a 50% boost in workflow sharing
We know that building successful flows leads to double the retention of users who do not have successful flows, so these numbers are key business metrics for us to move.
What's next? Integrate with AI to reduce choice paralysis — because workflows have near unlimited possibilities, we hope to use Generative AI in our system to give users exactly what they're looking for without the confusion of what is possible.
If you'd like to learn more about all of the effort that has gone into this product over the past 3 years, I love talking about it in person! Let's chat — brookegrosenthal@gmail.com