15Five 1-on-1s

Though I joined 15Five as a mobile product designer, I began working on the web product as well in 2020. I joined the squad responsible for the 1-on-1s feature, which helps employees prepare for and run their 1-on-1 meetings. The 1-on-1s feature had not been prioritized in over a year, so there were a lot of pain points to address.

Wireframing

Early process diagramming and wireframing was done to address several needs. First, we wanted to revisit the Scheduling and Ending flow that currently existed in the 1-on-1s product. 1-on-1s require having a scheduled date before a user can "end" the 1-on-1, which they must do in order to create a new 1-on-1. This is a complex flow that was related to the underlying logic of the feature, but we wanted to see what we could do to improve this process. So we created a user flow to document the current experience as and a new one to figure out how we could simplify it. 

We also knew that we had several feature requests for 1-on-1s that came from our customers. In order to explore how to actually execute on those requests, we explored different wireframes of those features to see how we might solve our customers' needs. Some wireframes here explored an additional date view for 1-on-1s, adding suggested talking points and applying templates, as well as setting up recurring 1-on-1s. 

User Testing

After deciding on a more concrete direction for improvements to 1-on-1s from the wireframes, I put together a prototype to put in front of our users to assess usability of the new features. We combined Notes/Comments on Talking Points and Action Items, Searching 1-on-1s, and setting up recurring 1-on-1s into one test since each individual task was fairly small on its own. 

We also used this as an opportunity to gather self reported user behavior and any additional points for future 1-on-1s improvement.

Iterative designs

Several areas of improvement were identified after completing user research. We renamed "notes" on talking points and action items to "comments" since that experience was modeled after comments in Google Docs, and there was already a module on this page called "notes" towards the bottom of the page, so we didn't want to have any confusion there. We also expanded the Searching 1-on-1s feature to include all 1-on-1s content, as opposed to only searching notes, which was the original intent. Finally, we realized we needed to include more granular options for setting up recurring 1-on-1s. 

Feedback/Measuring success

We received a lot of internal positive feedback for these features. At 15Five we have the advantage of being users of our own product, so we have the opportunity of getting immediate feedback on product updates. But of course there's some level of bias in there, so we ultimately want to hear from our external customers and track metrics to determine if a feature is a success or a failure. With the release of these product improvements, we were able to steadily increase 1-on-1s usage from about 9% to 15%.