Mo • 2022
Boosting better habits at work.
Context
Mo is a B2B startup built around a feed that shows who’s rewarded and recognised others in the team.
For this project, I was Head of Product and Design. So I led the Product and Engineering group, directly managed a product manager, and acted as a solo designer.
Problems to solve
For our customers
In a time of changing working patterns and behaviours — first introduced by COVID and later typified by the ‘Great Resignation’ — how might companies build more resilient and effective teams? Those that are less focused on the transactional elements of work, and instead want to help the team grow and develop together. Workplace rewards were becoming increasingly less effective at improving workplace efficiency and morale.
For our users
While many users were thankful that the Mo platform encouraged managers to reward and recognise them more, it didn’t answer the question of career development. Nor did it help users feel the same kind of community that they had when working full-time in the office was the norm. How might we help teams rebuild that sense of shared purpose and identity?
For the business
Reward and recognition is ultimately a volume play — you need to be large enough to get discounted rates on things like gift cards, experiences out, and even credit card processing. For a startup, this is difficult. Customers were also increasingly wary of how many subscriptions they were paying, and wanted to see more value from the platforms they were paying for.
So how might we help customers solve their HR and morale issues, while also becoming less reliant on the rewards product?
The team at Mo had already got started on an idea
They called it Boosts.
Boosts were prompts for sharing content that managers could create and schedule. Based around the Hooked Model, the idea was that Mo could be both a platform for rewarding, recognising, but also investing in team development and rituals.
The end goal was that the best, most-effective habits would be shared across companies on the Mo platform, potentially for a fee.
Existing artifacts
The Boosts product was an early-stage MVP. It was simply a form that would send out an email. In that email, you’d have a button that would take you back to Mo to respond. Mo would then show an aggregated view of all responses that week.
Areas to design for
Onboarding
Mo didn’t have an onboarding flow, because its Reward and Recognition product relied upon Sales to setup and onboard new customers. The aspiration for Boosts was that it would shift Mo towards a product-led growth model, more like Figma or Miro.
Set up and scheduling
For managers, we already had feedback it was hard to keep track of a Boost and when it would go out — the MVP version of Boosts provided no information about a Boost’s next send date. Even though the existing system only allowed for a single Boost per week, per manager. As we added more complexity, I knew that we’d need to help managers stay on top of their Boosts.
Composing and content
The value of the product came from helping managers have better quality conversations with their team. And the way we wanted to do that was by designing better prompts, and help them make the existing content more engaging.
Responding and viewing
We already had data to show that while managers were happy to set up Boosts, coworkers weren’t so keen to respond. We started out with ~30% response rates. So we knew that we had more work to do in getting people to respond, as well reward them for doing so.
Breaking down the work
Process
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I was very conscious of how few insights the team had around user motivation and painpoints. And I wanted them to get more comfortable learning quickly through product iteration.
The onboarding flow let us design for both managers as well as respondents for the first time. It also gave a way to test concepts more quickly, as we could open up the onboarding flow to anyone.
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The Boosts product had the potential to be as complicated an email marketing platform, such as Mailchimp. So getting scheduling right felt really important — even if it was just to show a single Boost.
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I had to find a way to let Boosts content and legacy reward and recognition content live side by side in the Mo app.
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For the reward product, there was often feedback that people would have liked more tools to express themselves.
For the Boosts product, I wanted to add richer content for both managers prompts and colleague responses.
UI exploration
My work coincided with a Tailwind rewrite of most of the frontend web app. This gave me a great opportunity to build new components that could scale with the product’s future direction.
Building a warm, engaging place to share with your team
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The Mo brand palette was designed to shock; Here’s a startup that wants to change how HR works. But the reality is that this was difficult to build with — there was either greys or bright neons. It was a harsh, cold app. Using these brand colours as a template, I built a whole new palette for the product.
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The future of work is open to everyone. It was really important to me that we used colour carefully to make Mo an accessible and inclusive experience for everyone. That included a lot of work with frontend to build out new palettes and remove opacities.
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Mo uses the Mabry Pro font throughout its app. But there wasn’t much consideration given previously to its weight, spacing, or how one might read the app’s content.
Project impact
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The work provided inspiration and direction to the new team I spun up to focus on this new business direction. It also helped the board OK the business’ decision to pivot the core product offering.
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The project went hand in hand with a frontend refactor — moving from backbone to Tailwind. So I got a chance to work on the component level, and helped the team move away from bespoke pages with varying levels of tech debt.
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Onboarding for managers sat at above 40% success rate. Which meant we were achieving industry benchmarks for onboarding, as set by the Openview benchmarks. We had more progress to go for onboarding new users.