What is Actimo?
Actimo is an Employee Experience platform offering companies the full web and mobile solution to build a custom employee app with communications, training, employee handbooks and much, much more. Actimo was acquired by Kahoot! in September, 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
I worked at Actimo as a Product Designer for a little over a year, before moving on to become Design Lead at Feats. The offer from Feats came at a time, where the acquisition and growing pains of Actimo was starting to impact my job, in a way where I no longer felt like the best match for it.
During my time at Actimo, I designed several major features including an employee directory and a notification center for the employee app. I also redesigned key parts of the platform such as a the entire administration system navigation for desktop and mobile. I conducted research to identify opportunities for improvements or design projects to pursue, informed the product strategy and challenged the product architecture and functionality.
Last but not least, I also created Actimo’s Design System which included full whitelabel theming support.
Winds of change
After Actimo was aquired by Kahoot in 2020, I was given the open task of identifying how we could take steps, small as well as large, to make the platform more “low-touch” and potentially self-served, for new customers.
To support new as well as existing customers, Actimo had a very large Customer Service team, who were always extremely busy, and sometimes even overwhelmed by the amount of work in servicing just one customer.
Research
As always with open questions, I would be doing some research. But in order to make sure I was learning the right things, I set some goals for that research, that aligned with the overall goal of the project.
- Investigate opportunities to make Actimo’s administration more intuitive and easier to use for existing and entirely new Admins.
- Investigate opportunities to offer initial and general training or help inside the platform in collaboration with Support/Customer Success.
- Investigate challenges with the current navigation or architecture, both large-scale structural and small-scale usability issues.
Taking a walk in a new customer’s shoes
The best way of coming up with ideas on how to improve the product for new customers, was experiencing the product like one. I created a new platform, mapped out all the pages and noted all the “issues” I encountered; things not being intuitive, unnecessary friction, and “lost” opportunities for example in Empty States.
Interviewing existing customers about their first time experience
I wrote down the interview questions in an interview guide, and teamed up with my colleague Sofie who worked with Customer Support and Product Training. We set up interview sessions with nine different customers, and split the interviews in two. One half was for Sofie with questions about platform onboarding and training, that she could use for her work in our support platform Intercom. The other half was for me, with questions about general usability and challenges in the administration specifically.
Internal research to understand a new customer’s journey through the different departments
In addition to the interviews with the customers, I also interviewed two of our own Customer Succes Managers from Actimo about the their challenges with getting new customers started in the platform.
And with the help from Actimo’s Head of Product Morten, my former boss, Sofie and I planned, set up and facilitated a fully remote cross-department collaboration workshop, with representatives from each department.
The goal was to create a sort of “New Customer Journey Map” to fully understand the customer’s journey through the different departments, Sales as well as Customer Success and Support. Together, we talked not only about the paints of new customers, but also the pains of the different departments, as well as the opportunities of solving those issues.
Revealing internal challenges across several departments
Setup
Setting up a new platforms was a tedious, manual task for Customer Success Managers. The product was not geared to allow customers to sign up on their own, as it started out as an “empty shell”. It also required a Graphic Designer from Marketing to create visuals for the app.
Training
Getting started was a steep learning curve with no guidance in the platform. The platform itself was not very intuitive. Onboarding and product training was heavily relying on CSMs and Support. Customer Succes was overburdened; resulting in a toxic overworking culture.
Content
No pre-existing content or structure means a Customer Success Manager and clients plan out the entire employee app structure and strategy. This requires many meetings of several hours. Sales, Customer Success and the customer do not always agree how to do things.
Scalability
With the Kahoot! acquisition, massive scaling was the new goal within just a few years, by also selling to SMBs. The product needed to be able to support this, by being way more self-served. One dedicated Customer Success Manager per client is not very scalable.
Getting the overview of all the findings and ideas in an Opportunity Solution Tree
To organise all the ideas, I created an Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) and added all the many possible opportunities and solutions we’d heard and discussed over time, as well a whole bunch of my own ideas. I also showed the OST to the rest of the Product and Tech team to get their ideas as well.
Sharing insights with the rest of the company
Sharing insights with others is sometimes almost just as important as obtaining them. I added all insights into Actimo’s Productboard and tagged them to relevant ideas. I also created a PowerPoint with all the major discoveries, and presented them in an open (online) session, where anyone from the company could join to learn about our new customer’s challenges.
Design
Singling out the solutions that will give most bang for the buck, or be an important strategic move
Out of the ideas in our Opportunity Solution Tree, I singled out 15 projects that were particularly interesting using a UX Prioritisation Matrix. The complexity ranged from everywhere between a platform-wide navigation redesign to creating an Intercom Product Tour or setting up a welcome email. The one thing all solutions had in common was having a high impact user experience wise. I sketched out some wireframes for the 15 potential projects, to quickly demonstrate the solution and design ideas.
We continued with 2-3 of the projects that were implemented, and the rest was added to the backlog. I also created a quick slideshow of all the projects as well as details about then, and their current status. The slideshow was presented to Actimo’s CEO Eske Gunge as a way to show what was going on in the Product team, and establish trust and better understanding for our work.
Informing the product strategy and challenging the architecture of the product
A few of the projects I outlined challenged the existing product structure, for the better, of course. And this, to me, is the best part of my job. Diving into the user experience lets you discover things that will change how you view the product as a whole, and give you ideas on how to drastically improve it.
One thing that became particularly and painfully clear was that the system was suffering from split personality disorder. The employee app and the administration system behind it didn’t live on the same platform, which caused some issues, especially with the users’ understanding of the system.
My personal belief is to fix a problem at its root, sooner rather than later. Rip off the bandaid. That’s pretty much what we did at Learningbank when we redesigned the whole platform, implemented a new design system, and when it was later updated to a new tech stack. A decision, I personally believe, was a critical one that has kept the platform competitive. So for Actimo, I came up with a direction I called “One Unified Platform” which would have a Roles and Permissions project as its beginning, and then we could go from there.
In my opinion, the best solution would be to turn the platform into being a frontend which would be the employee app, and a backend which would be the administration, governed by different levels of user permissions–like a WordPress solution. This would be much more understandable and intuitive for customers. Of course the technical side would have to be investigated first.
But the idea of One Unified Platform was also what finally made me successful in convincing the team to let me create one Design System for both the admin and app, complete with theming support for customers’ brands. Because being two different systems also meant having two different designs. The reasoning for this had previously been that the employee app has a company’s branding while the administration has Actimo’s branding.
A reason which, in my opinion, didn’t really warrant the effort needed to maintain two separate designs. From my own experience as a developer, I knew that having one Design System would also greatly reduce the complexity on the technical side, which the developers at Actimo also preferred.
Redesigning the Navigation in the Administration for better usability
Something that had become apparent from the very initial user interviews with existing customers was, that the navigation of administration was confusing. And after having tested the system like a new customer myself, as well as doing a focused UX audit of the navigation, it became apparent why, and also what needed to be done to improve the usability.
Unifying the menu system for the entire administration
The original administration had two different, separate menu systems; a side-menu which was visible most of the time, and a tab-menu, which replaced the side-menu when entering the ambiguous “Admin” part of the administration.
To unify the navigation design, I created a navigation which combined the side-menu and the tab-menu design patterns to keep the navigation behaviour consistent across the system. Additional labels and dropdowns could be added while hovering the side-menu to quickly enter sub-menu items, which also appeared on the pages as tabs.
Surfacing features and settings that were often used
Setting up an integration is something you do maybe once, and usually also as an Administrator. But creating new categories for the content in your employee app is something you do more often, as an Editor. But these features were found in the same area, despite being used with much different frequency, by different people. In my redesign, I focused on making sure features which were used often got “surfaced,” while features used very rarely were pushed back. Something like “setting shortcuts” could be introduced for all the less rare settings.
Grouping similar or related features and settings
Features and settings that were logically similar and even relevant for each other, could be in two separate places, likely because they were technically different. This meant you’d have to go on a hunt every time you needed to do just one simple task.
So in my redesign I grouped together similar and related features and settings. Doing Card Sorting exercises with users is a great way to get their take on what is similar and relevant. But settings and options that were related to creating content for customer’s employee apps should not be included in the intimidating Administration menu with Integrations and Security options.
The navigation design found in Actimo today, is based on my initial redesign, as well as the Design System used to design it with.