Paretify

Product Design

Introduction

Overview

During my time studying at the IT University of Copenhagen, my class was selected by Paretify to brainstorm improvements for their web app.

Paretify conducts employee surveys for companies and creates visualizations to help understand perspectives from both sides to determine how balanced they are. My team's scope was to brainstorm how Paretify could improve the way they display results to users.

My Role

While working in a team of 5 people, I personally:

Created prototypes in Figma, ranging from low to high fidelity.
Brainstormed hypotheses to improve comprehension and engagement.
Conducted user interviews to identify pain points and needs.
Analyzed user feedback from prototypes and iterated on insights gathered.

Timeline

February - June 2024

Problem

Paretify's results page was not effectively conveying the necessary information.

Their old implementation presented results using a 2x2 matrix, which required significant cognitive effort to interpret. This often overwhelmed users and failed to effectively convey the idea of "balance". If users are unable to comprehend or gain insights from the results, it defeats the purpose of conducting surveys entirely.

research

Studying the Old Implementation

Two dimensional survey to see how aligned employees are with their companies

Results are plotted onto a 2x2 matrix with 4 different sections

Two dimensional survey to see how aligned employees are with their companies

Results are plotted onto a 2x2 matrix with 4 different sections

Two dimensional survey to see how aligned employees are with their companies

Results are plotted onto a 2x2 matrix with 4 different sections

Two dimensional survey to see how aligned employees are with their companies

The goal of these surveys is to help both companies and individuals understand what areas they can grow in. We were tasked with brainstorming a redesign for the results page, reimagining how to present the data to optimize users' understanding. A word that kept on being brought up was "Balance", and so that became the focus of our redesign.

Two dimensional survey to see how aligned employees are with their companies. Results are then plotted onto a 2x2 matrix with 4 different sections

User Feedback

It took a long time for me to understand what each section of the graph meant.

Our employees struggled to understand key takeaways from the survey results.

I wish the results would give me tangible insights about my experience.

By talking to the founders, and going over entries of user feedback that they received, we tried to understand what they and the users cared about about and had issues with. We found three reoccurring issues that users were having:

Users struggle to understand the 2x2 matrix and what each section represents.
Users find it difficult to extract meaningful insights from the results.
Users feel there is no real reason to engage with the results.

Focus Areas

From the insights we gathered through the user feedback we determined three key areas to focus on:

Graphic Visualization

This was the center of many complaints, so it became a major focus.

Users found the original confusing and it required a large cognitive load to understand.

This was the center of many complaints, so it became a major focus.

Users found the original confusing and it required a large cognitive load to understand.

AI Summaries

We wanted to utilize these to make it easy to understand and derive meaning from the results.

AI generated summaries was also a feature the founders really wanted to see included.

We wanted to utilize these to make it easy to understand and derive meaning from the results.

AI generated summaries was also a feature the founders really wanted to see included.

Feedback

We wanted to find ways for people to interact with the results.

Allow users to give or receive feedback about their results, as well as provide ways to interact with data itself.

We wanted to find ways for people to interact with the results.

Allow users to give or receive feedback about their results, as well as provide ways to interact with data itself.

Hypothesis

By replacing the existing graphic with a visualization that better represents the concept of "Balance", integrating AI-generated summaries to explain insights, and adding ways for users to interact with and explore the results, we believed users would better understand and engage with the product.

Final Design Preview

Here is a side-by-side of Paretify's old results page next to our redesign. Let me walk you through how we got there.

Design Iterations

Graphic Representations

Paretify's original implementation used a 2x2 matrix (top left figure). From the user feedback, we chose to move away from that style of graph and settled on a Venn Diagram to better convey the idea of "balance" to users.

The founders liked using dots as visual indicators for the individual variables, but we found that users consistently found them too ornamental and distracting. We settled on a cleaner representation, dividing sections by survey category and highlighting the balanced metric underneath.

We explored different ways the graph could adapt depending on the results, finally deciding that the graphs should slightly overlap more or less based on how balanced the employee is with the company, with the percentage displayed underneath.

Page Layout with Text Summaries

The goal of the summaries was to help users understand and be able to take away meaning from the results of the surveys. We thought of it as supplementing the graph visualization so we played around with different ways these text summaries could be implemented around the graphics.

Through this exploration, we started to brainstorm general layouts we could implement. Our initial idea was having a long page with graphics and information visualizations dispersed throughout bits of text that would summarize the results. We moved on from that to having two prototypes which incorporated three different sections: the graphic, the list, and feedback. One prototype had these sections laid out on a singular page and the other had them on separate pages that users could navigate between.

User Testing

We interviewed 11 random students while having them try both prototypes A and B. Two key insights emerged from the feedback:

Page Layout

Users favored having information split up over different pages top make the content more digestible and easier to find.

Results Overview

Users thought the summary felt out of place in prototype A while the graphic page in prototype B was't very useful.

Second Round of Testing

For our second round, we created a fleshed out prototype with three separate pages for the graphic, the list and a feedback page.

Directly from the homepage, users were able to interact with the graphic. With the summary at the side, it allows users to quickly get insights, adapting to the category they are focused on. Users could then click on a specific section of the graph that brings them to a more detailed list view of the results.

Insights Gained

We tested the new prototype on 5 of the same people and 4 new students. From that exploration we gained insights to iterate on a final version.

Navigation

Users found accessing the list by clicking through the graph confusing.

While trying to make the graph more interactable we lost a focus on usablility.

This was the center of many complaints, so it became a major focus.

Users found the original confusing and it required a large cognitive load to understand.

Control Bar

The way the control bar worked on the home page vs the sub pages was slightly different.

We observed that users often didn't interact with the bar until getting to the list pages.

We wanted to utilize these to make it easy to understand and derive meaning from the results.

AI generated summaries was also a feature the founders really wanted to see included.

Focus Area

It took a while for users to understand the objective of flagging variables.

The focus areas page lacked depth for helping users since it was so disconnected from the rest of the results.

We wanted to find ways for people to interact with the results.

Allow users to give or receive feedback about their results, as well as provide ways to interact with data itself.

Final Design

For our final design we simplified the user flow by moving the lists directly to the front page and pivoted the "Focus Area" page to "Result Insights". We pinned the flagged variables to the front of the insights panel and highlighted summaries inside the page for users who wanted to dive deeper.

Increasing Engagement

Giving Control to the User

One of our main goals was to allow people to play around with the data. We grouped the data controls into this singular control bar.

Users can sort and filter data, allowing them to find variables they see as important and encouraging interaction with the page as a whole. The primary action users can perform is flagging important variables, which brings us to the "Result Insights".

Actions from Results

Paretify’s goal is to foster growth between employees and companies. The "Result Insights" act as a way to give users a purpose when exploring their results. Users can view a detailed report of their results and see flagged variables. They can also write and attach messages about the results or highlight things they want to discuss in their next one-on-one meeting with their manager.

This page serves as a recap of the results and as a bridge connecting employees and managers, ensuring everyone can be aligned.