Pronto
Providing Agile teams with software to create a better work environment.
Role
Designer (Group Project)
Skills
Product Design, UX Research, Teamwork
Pronto is a plug-in for the product management software JIRA. Through research, interviews, and the utilization of the Atlassian design system my team and I created a daily survey tool for Agile teams.
The Problem
With an increase in remote work and importance of mental-health awareness following the COVID-19 pandemic, companies need a way to measure employee productivity and satisfaction in an intuitive, sustainable, and non-invasive way.
The Opportunity
There is an opportunity to provide Agile teams with a better work environment by providing a software that increases visibility of strengths, morale, and concerns.
Pronto - the survey tool that allows employees to voice their concerns, and emphasize their strengths. Pronto complies data and creates visualizations to benefit employees, managers and leadership.
Project Timline
The Why
Product management softwares allow employees to complete tasks, and managers to view this data and analyze productivity. After studying the corporate landscape, my team learned that there is a missing link - how might we understand employee’s mental health and satisfaction, and how its linked to productivity?
We studied other survey tools used in the corporate world to understand what was lacking. We found that cumbersome “well-being” surveys could not provide enough detailed data and there was a lack of useful data visualizations.
We conducted 9 interviews to gain a deep understanding of what is required to make our product a useful tool. We spoke with junior employees, managers, and corporate leaders to get a full scope of needs and values when it comes to voicing satisfaction and tracking productivity.
Interview Findings
Managers need an understanding of their team member’s work ethic, rate of task completion and interpersonal skills so they can assign tasks.
Company Leaders are interested in data that shows: employee productivity over time, employee’s skill set, salary justification, and work quality per team so they can accurately bill hours.
Employees would like to have their voices heard in a way that does not feel cumbersome or invasive so they can be more productive in their workspace.
Jira is an Atlassian agile project management software that is used by over 180,000 users in 190 different countries. Over 65,000 companies use Jira.
Rather than building a product with a lot of similar functionalities to Jira, we decided to create a plugin to work alongside Jira. This would be cheaper to produce, easier for companies to implement, and allow us to pull data from a lot of functionalities that already exist on Jira.
To prototype and design Pronto, we incorporated elements from the open source Atlassian Design system in Figma.
Many Agile teams use product management softwares such as Jira. This allows for teams to follow Agile methodologies and track tasks, Epics, and get their work done. After meeting with Agile coach Nancy Bennett - we learned that the best Agile teams do their own tracking of things like mental health and satisfaction. What if there was a plug-in that did this for them?
User Personas
We used our interview and research data, personal experience in the corporate world, and advice from an Agile coach to craft three user personas for the Pronto plug-in.
Pronto is a Jira plugin that encourages visibility, voice, and employee mental health between story points and project deadlines.
Quick, 2-3 Question Surveys that gather employee data regarding work ethic, skills, strengths, preferences, bandwidth, mood, and concerns.
Data Visuals that help managers and upper leadership interpret this data, take action, and make informed decisions.
Projection Mapping that allows leadership and management to see how re-orgs could affect and improve productivity.
Custom Pronto tags that allow managers and PMs to create their own data sets to track, outside of the pre-defined types within their AGILE team.
Streaks and Badges that encourage employee usage and enthusiasm. Rather than penalizing employees for not filling out their surveys, Pronto encourages users with a gamification element.
Utilization Rates that are more accurate than relying on Jira’s “story points” alone. Now managers can understand productivity based on speed and tasks accomplished.
Leadership
Understand how corporate leadership can leverage Pronto data through the perspective of Dave!
The Manager
With Pronto, Managers like Jen can learn more about their employees productivity and happiness while being less intrusive.
The Employee
Learn how corporate employees like Monica can voice their opinions about their company with positive reinforcement and understand their personal statistics with Pronto.
Iteration
My team and I conducted many rounds of iteration on our ideas, and worked together to split up tasks. “Improving the digital employee experience” was an extremely broad prompt, and working to iterate and narrow down our ideas, and define our scope was a valuable learning experience. FigJam was our best friend for this project!
Pronto Team
Designers: Kayleigh Ground (that's me!), Gia Caruso,
Mandy Chen, Kelly Jin, Will Palmer, Valerie Schuster.
1. The best managers and AGILE teams don't succeed by the numbers, but by open communication and understanding. 💡
2. Employee well-being and happiness is key to productivity and a great company. Being able to measure this gives teams an upper-hand. 👊🏼
3. Managers can monitor while not being too intrusive and employees can use this tool to benefit their own professional goals! 💻
Want to learn more about this project?
I'd love to chat - shoot me an email! keg9293@rit.edu
