Recent years have brought a heightened attention to workplace well-being. Often focused on employees. But what about the well-being of managers and executives? That's what the project Lederes Trivsel is set up to improve. By increasing awareness and understanding, and by providing a set of digital intervention tools for making impact and improvements. The project that’s partly funded by Velliv Foreningen also enjoys the support and partnership of a range of major institutions in the Danish industry and trade unions such as Lederne, Dansk Industri, Dansk Erhverv and DJØF.
In the spring 2024 we did a major design upgrade of the project, including a new version of the tools and an upgrade of the project website design.
Informed by the feedback of pre-existing early versions of the tools, we could focus the redesign on lifting the overall user experience and the look and feel, and by re-shaping the tools to better suit the situations in which they are used.
The existing tools built on a tried and tested framework for questioning the current state of well-being for individual managers, groups of managers and for executives and company leadership in general, across a set of selected themes. And on a method for qualifying group discussions in a workshop setting, guided by a facilitation framework set up in Powerpoint, making sure all is heard and all relevant concerns are voiced.
I started with a critical review of the existing workflows and components, to identify the critical paths and user journeys within each of them. Part of the tools are workshops, where participants come together as a group to reveal, discuss and plan how to overcome their most pressing issues and to get tangible documentation of the process and decisions made in order to be able to follow up. And part of the tools are about individual participants preparing for the workshops on their own, in their time. We needed the tools to work in both situations.
Along the way I had the opportunity to reflect upon the nature of digital intervention tools. Whereas the internet is flooded with opportunities to buy stuff in the blink of an eye or to surrender your attention before you even blink, the opportunity to create positive change with digital tools is always just around the corner. But these tools require an entirely different approach to user experience and design.
Three areas of reflection
Design with understanding
When the outcome of a digital process is not the acquisition of a product or a service, but rather an internal, psychological, cognitive or behavioural change in the user or a group of users, it’s critical to understand both the user and the change incited by the tool.
An intervention is a chance to learn something or in other way evolve or transcend to a new state. An intervention takes the user from their former state to the new.
In what situation can it happen? What are the formal and informal requirements of the change? Who benefits from making the change? And why do we seek to make it? In our case, we bring people together in a workshop. How do we make it work in a group?
Design for focus
When you understand the change, it’s time to design the situation in which it can happen. Crafting any tool you should be aware that you are creating something that’s always a part of a bigger picture. Something that's useful for the users in the context or their particular job-to-be-done. A tool is a means to an end, not an end itself. Allow people to leave the tool and pick it up again, in their own time. Guide and inspire, rather than control and force the user through a funnel
Apply a concept of ‘just enough’ information to facilitate good progress without unnecessary disturbance.
Remove obstacles from processes, but never at the expense of the user’s awareness of what step they are at. Processes need to take just the right time; the user’s time.
Consider what happens on the screen of the digital tool, but also what happens in the room beyond the screen? Is the screen even necessary? Could we build the experience in audio instead? Or in an analogue way that might increase the presence of participants?
Design for change
How do we create lasting changes? What is the general ability to follow up and be reminded about the effort and work done with the tools? Always offer an opportunity to circle back and continue the work, to revisit and reconsider, or to remember the valuable insights gained. Is there a way to measure progress?
Do we need to involve other actors in the process? To help, guide, counsel or assist.
And apart from the internal change, what tangible outcome can we offer from the process? What is it? What should it enable? How is it created? What token or trigger can we leave as part of the experience to inspire the user to return or revisit the process.
In this case the tools offer eg. a personal contract, a poster with an agreement or a set of action cards to save, share or print. Something to circle back to to ensure that change is actually happening.
So, armed with empathy and understanding, a tested framework of themes and questions to open with and some user feedback, and a clear concept of the main structure we started the re-design process. Beyond the conceptual UX design work, it included setting up a new visual identity, with a single recognizable logo, colors and fonts that could appeal across industries and provide a foundation of comfort and trust, necessary for the process to work.
The tools were implemented in the no-code platform Bubble. The project presentation website in Webflow, and an additional section for booking time for virtual training sessions introducing the tool, was build on top of the Webflow integration through Make and Mailerlite.
Additional deliveries included advising and assisting on GDPR and setting up privacy policy. Cookie consent implementation. And implementation for Weglot for automated translations.
In order to both communicate about the project and to create the needed calmness and comfort while being simple in terms of navigation and ease of use when using the tools, we needed to strike a balance for the visual identity and design of something memorable, a bit subtle and discreet, and highly functional. And since we needed to communicate with users from very different industries and professional levels and roles and various stakeholders, we needed to place the identity at a solid middle ground with no direct attachments.
The circle within the circle of the logo-mark signifies a leader that is also always a part of the group in an organisation, although sometimes at the front of it. On top of that we settled on the spacious, modern, non-offensive variable font Karla, that's widely available and a primary color along with dark and light to make everything come together and move it forward in one, single direction.
All design work was done in Figma: From the visual identity design and the UX design with sitemaps and prototypes and experimenting with functionality to the detailed webdesign ready for implementation.
Getting in touch with difficult issues and preparing for a workshop about sensitive matters with peers requires the right space and time. Therefore it’s essential to not force the process into the classical wordesks or ‘at the computer’ scenario. But rather offer the option to the test and preparation on any device at any time.
Allowing participants to prepare in their own time, with a simple workflow and a privacy proof setting, creates room for better and more honest answers, and supports the intimacy required for good overall result.
Dealing with sensitive matters such as wellbeing in a digital environment, having a clear understanding of who can see what, and the comfort of trusting the ‘system’. Building this on the no-code platform Bubble.io we could create the necessary complex and personalised user journeys without compromising on the quality of the tools nor on the privacy set up that’s crucial for establishing the needed trust with the user. By setting up an agnostic database with no personal information at all, and the proper workflows and automations, we could make sure both to keep the data right across the process and experience, and to make it inaccessible when no longer needed.
All at the same time, we could make the experience and the tolls completely open and accessible to anyone without requiring any form of registration.
On top of the mental or behavioral change incited by the intervention tools a key component to the experience is workshop take aways. What are the actual agreements made? How do we follow up? While facilitating the talks around the specific pressing issues of the groups. These questions are also settled as part of the framework and process guiding and facilitating the workshops. Final agreements are made easy to save or print as a PDF or by downloading the texts for further polishing or continued work in the group's own context. A clear take away, and something concrete to circle back to when following up.
To support the introduction of the tools in bigger organisations and to assist onboarding a series of virtual trainings are set up for the tools. Being able to build nocode automations with Make on top of the Webflow implementation of the project website, we could use Mailerlite as both a registration platform and an email service ensuring good communication practices with the participants, while preserving the state of the art design capabilities of Webflow when signing up. With its clean, simplistic and no-nudging approach I tend to favor Mailerlite highly over the more widely known, but not more functional service Mailchimp these days. It's easier to get things done for both me and for clients using it.
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