Phoenix - Company Cultural Index

The non-profit Insure Equality, who focuses on uplifting all voices and improving equality in the insurance industry, wanted to create a platform that would allow current and previous employees of companies in the industry a way to rate the culture of their workplaces. Essentially it would allow the employees to hold the rest of the industry accountable by openly rating the cultural components of the companies they had worked for.

Main problems to solve:

How to allow people to share openly how they felt working at a company?
How to keep anonymity and privacy to a high degree while still balancing the ability for companies to see where they needed work? (Protection from retaliation balanced with accountability.)

Doubling up on that last point, in circumstances like the one minority on a small team, how do we allow the user to share without the company knowing who rated them, especially if the employee still works there?

How do we convince the user to open up and share potentially sensitive experiences, and have them trust that we'll do ethical things with the shared information?

The Research:

Step 1: User Stories and Identifying the User:

To be sure that I had an understanding of the user and some corner cases on who may be taking the questionnaire as well as using the scores later, I created a few user stories after performing some general market research on who was currently in the industry and what the common themes were between potential groups being represented. This included getting a grasp on who was a minority voice in the industry, who were the voices that were up and coming, and what some of the challenges were that they were encountering. I grouped these users into the three main types of people we would expect to use the survey: current employee, ex-employee, and the company (management).

Example of User Story (There are two others and can be provided if you're interested.):

Employee - Current

Name: Jamie - Age - 40 - Asian - Female - Recently Divorced - 2 kids

Profile: Producer with a small agency, has been working for their company for one year now.

Goals: Looking to move up in their career at the current agency, and would like to eventually move up to management there, or onto managing their own agency. She’s not entirely happy at her current place of business though due to some discrimination she’s experienced either directly or passively. Would like to shop around for new agencies that seem to not overlook her either due to her gender, race, or her situation with her kids being a newly divorced mom with a complicated schedule at times.

Hopes and Fears: That they will be unable to move up the ladder into management due to their gender and the fact that they’re a single mom who often has to deal with childcare issues when the ex isn’t available. Her kids are getting older though so hopes that when she gets more responsibilities at this agency, they will be able to drive themselves to school. Wants to do her best at her job but from past experience has seen that many times she gets passed up for new management opportunities due to the boy’s club style atmosphere in agency management as well as has seen her male coworkers progress easier into those roles due to preferential treatment. Wants to leave a review for her current company but is afraid that due to how small the company is, and how there aren’t many asian women at the agency that her review will leave her an easy target for dismissal or retribution.

Tactical Considerations: Need to assure that this user feels supported in her goals finding a new agency that will treat her respectfully, and discretion as a current employee of a company that she’s reviewing. Ability for this user to find other agencies that do support her goals.

After this, I also created a Customer Touchpoint Map for both the team, board of directors, and other stakeholders. This is considered sensitive information so for those purposes I've left it off of this site since it's public. Essentially it plots the entire experience for the users depending on if it's a current/past employee leaving a review, as well as the experience of the companies being rated, grouped in either small or large businesses. This was incredibly useful for identifying the flow of the questionnaire as well as some tactical considerations along the way.

Step 2: More Research

I knew that we needed to understand how best to gain the trust of the user, as well as handle sensitive information well, and try to parse the emotional aspects of the perception of culture in a company. So I started with gathering information on how psychiatric nurses performed interviews with patients in their care. The main takeaways that I got were:

Establish trust by presenting up front in the interview as well as at the end of the interview: that you're here not to judge but to help, to remind that anything that they say is completely confidential, and that anything they share will be used to help them.
Present back summaries of information, allow the interviewees to confirm or correct that information so there's full understanding.
So the question remained, in a digital setting, since there are less ways that we can visually and physically display trust, how do we assure the individuals being interviewed that they can trust what they're sharing will be confidential but still be partially relayed to their employer? By demonstrating exactly what we will share with the employer and what will just go directly into the score of that company's culture.

To solve that problem, I decided to do a few things:

Gain Trust: Provide more information up front, present to the user what's going to be asked, how it's going to be used later, and what they'll be able to change before their score gets posted.
Affirm Trust: Provide information throughout the questionnaire that allows the user to be extra sure that they can be honest, without worrying about whether or not their answer was going to be publicly shown.
Promote Expression: Give the user more options to speak their mind. By offering the users throughout the questionnaire to be more or less expressive, we allow them to open up as much as they're comfortable. These don't necessarily go into the computation of the public score but allow the user to clarify why an answer was selected.
Humanize: Allow the user to give feedback on an emotional level. By utilizing emojis for certain questions, we take the concept of Wong Baker's pain scale from the medical world, and apply it to the questionnaire.

Measuring emotional impact of the culture of a workplace can be difficult through just numbers, but we can on our end break down the facial expressions given through emojis into a numerical rating.
Restate: Represent the users' answers at the end, and allow the user more time after the questionnaire is completed to change their answer.

For the second item in particular, I decided to create the Safe Haven Question. It's an icon that the user sees next to each question that they can be sure isn't going to be presented to the public.

Low fidelity wireframe of the mobile view of the intro for the questionnaire:

Low fidelity wireframe of an example question on mobile:

The speech bubble icon would be next to most questions where appropriate, which would pop up a text box that allows the user at any time to give more feedback. These are always hidden from the company, but used again to allow the user to explain their answer and express as much as they need to. (This is a feature that is not in the final product as of mid 2022 but will be implemented in next stages of the product.)

Design Phase

The team and board of directors were very pleased with these wireframes and we were cleared with minor tweaks to go forward with the design.

For the design elements for the questionnaire and the website, I was given free control as long as certain information was present. The goals that I wanted of the questionnaire were for it to feel calming, less static and sterile than most business websites I'd seen, and give references to the website for Insure Equality. So for the calming elements I took two themes:

1. Reference the abstract art I'd seen in waiting rooms, doctor's offices, hospitals, and often hotels.

2. For the calming aspects: Model some different design concepts I'd seen in the architecture industry's WELL certification model that utilizes elements that feel more natural to humans such as subtly changing shape, color, and light like one would find in nature (ex: light filtering through leaves in a forest, the changes on the surface of the water in a stream.).

3. Use the speed of a lava lamp or clouds to make these elements unintrusive to the concentration of the user but still passively calming.

So I took the art from the current website which included a lot of blobs of color, paintbrush strokes, and other muted but still colorful elements, and I animated them very slightly with CSS animations. (The other developer made sure these were loaded in such a way where it would: a. not impact the speed of the site, and b. wouldn't cause issues if they couldn't load due to connection issues or low end devices, since css animations can be kind of taxing to certain older tech.)

Then I placed a these elements behind an element that had a transparency to it, to mute the intensity and give it that "behind a frosted glass" sort of appearance. In that way, users that reviewed it, said that it was so subtle they didn't notice it at first, but didn't distract them from the questionnaire.

Certain things changed before the launch such as the name from Medusa to Phoenix, and particular features that were initially planned, needed to be put into different phases for later development due to timelines and other development priorities/constraints.

Final Design:

(Screenshots from the site as of mid 2022, v 1.0)

We have a track along the top that is broken down per section. (Nothing makes you want to stop answering questions more than some tracker that gives a certain percentage which could be completely arbitrary and different per website. It reminds me of the progress bar when updating OSX...do I go get a cup of coffee or just go take a nap, what's 55%??? ...but I digress.) Only questions for each part of the questionnaire are on a given page, so questions about the organization, then department, and finally down to the team you are/were on.

Look at those safe haven questions! Would you wanna give an honest review if you were the only minority at your company and you had to answer what your demographic was? I wouldn't!