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Employee Engagement Survey from 0 to 1

My Role

Sole Designer

Team

Problem

We were tasked with building a new feature within the Workforce Management suite that would allow client managers to:

  • Send out recurring or one-time surveys with predefined questions

  • Collect and visualize employee feedback

  • Understand sentiment trends over time

There were no existing flows, research, or components to leverage—this was a full 0→1 product.

1 Designer Manager,

1 UX writer,

1 Product Manager,

1 Engineering Team (off-shore)

1 Design System Team

UX Outcome

Timeline

  • Delivered responsive designs (desktop, tablet, mobile) covering all edge cases

  • Enabled seamless engineering handoff via Figma specs and design tokens

  • Successfully launched MVP on time, with strong adoption and positive client feedback

4 months, 2023

Survey Scheduling – Manager Experience

Starting Point / Empty State

Survey Question Preview

Survey Schedule Specifications

Tablet/Mobile Adaptations

Survey Results – Manager Experience

Overview Page with Currently Running Instance

Survey Results - Summary View

Check-In Survey Results - Employee View

Tablet/Mobile Adaptations

Employee Experience

Entering from Dashboard or Inbox

Focused Survey Screen

Completed State

Tablet/Mobile Adaptations

Discovery & Planning

Challenge: No Foundational Research

We inherited vague ideas from leadership but had no prior discovery or clear problem framing.

My Approach

  • Conducted a competitive audit of similar features in tools like Peakon and Lattice

  • Led a story mapping workshop with PM to break the problem into user journeys

  • Used MoSCoW prioritization to define what was critical for MVP vs. later phases

  • Worked with the PM to define personas: People Ops leads, frontline managers, and employees

Outcome

A clearly scoped Earliest Usable Product aligned with user needs and business goals, plus buy-in from engineering for technical feasibility.

Design Execution

Handling Ambiguous Rules

Problem: Requirements like “scoring sentiment” or “editing surveys after launch” were unclear and constantly changing.

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What I Did:

  • Documented open questions in a shared figma/jira tracker

  • Facilitated working sessions with the PM and engineers to align on edge cases

  • Created quick prototypes to test assumptions before committing to visuals

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Impact: We proactively reduced back-and-forth with developers and minimized rework by validating early.

Designing for Component Gaps

Problem: There was no existing design system component for Likert-style survey inputs.

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What I Did:

  • Identified the limitations in our Button Group component (fixed widths, poor label wrapping)

  • Proposed a new variable-width option to the Design System team

  • In the meantime, designed temporary versions using Selectable Chips with adjusted padding and behavior

  • Coordinated with engineers on a seamless swap once the official component was ready

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Impact: Unblocked development timelines while advocating for a scalable design system improvement.

Data Visualization with Constraints

Problem: Engineers planned to use HighCharts, which came with visual constraints for our response and sentiment charts.

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What I Did:

  • Audited HighCharts capabilities and limitations

  • Simplified the chart UI without losing meaning (e.g. stacked bar charts, tooltips)

  • Provided specs and fallback states for zero data, errors, and mobile views

  • Created a tokenized color scale for sentiment categories to maintain consistency

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Impact: We achieved consistency across dashboards while respecting the limitations of the library—ensuring design fidelity without friction.

Key Learnings

  • Designing 0→1 features requires balancing ideal UX with practical MVP scope

  • Clear async documentation (open questions, rationale) is critical when working with changing requirements

  • It’s important to advocate for system-level improvements—but offer workarounds to keep teams unblocked

  • Design is not just screens—it's the bridge between ambiguity and clarity

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