Dado is an employee experience platform for HR professionals to automate onboarding, offboarding, and more.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Year
2023
Location
Berlin, Germany - Remote
Project 1
Saving Experience changes
Situation
I worked with their CEO, CTO and head of product on this project. This was a small part of a larger vision to improve the platform’s overall user experience. Some of the main challenges we were trying to solve for included:
1. Too many levels for an admin to save changes throughout the user journey causing confusion and loosing lots of hours of work.
2. If two admins were editing an item at the same time there was no way to know.
3. There was no way to save drafts without publishing changes.
Obstacles
This project did not have clear deadlines, access to users was not easily attainable, there were many other unrelated small design projects to complete during the exploration phase, and I had many other tasks to juggle besides being a designer.
During this project we also were exploring new markets to try to expand outside of HR which put this project on hold.
Action
I reviewed other platforms that supported drafts, multiplayer modes, and explored multiple solutions with prototypes to get feedback on what would be feasible from an engineering perspective while trying to plan for changes to our information architecture. I also mapped out our ideal information architecture and made sure this design would fit into future changes.
Results
I am not sure if this project was ever completed but the feedback from the team was that this was an elegant solution to our problem and a step in the right direction to simplify the overall experience of our platform.
Project 2
Moments
Situation
Dado wanted to build a “freemium” feature to build interest in our main feature. The goal with moments was to send automated messages to entire companies.
Obstacles
Building a 0 to 1 feature the primary obstacle I faced was making sure I was either using existing components or creating new ones that I could use across the platform. This team was very small allowing us to work quickly but also meant we had limited resources.
Action
I worked closely with engineering during this project to make sure any new components were easy to implement and scalable for future use cases.
I did a competitive analysis to review what other leaders in the industry were building and find the weaknesses to improve upon.
I worked closely with product management and the CEO/CPO to create versions and prototypes to share with customers to get real-time feedback on this feature.
Results
We built this feature and immediately had key customers start to use it. It was easily implemented as it used technology we had already built for our other features.
what did I learn?
I joined Dado because thought I wanted more autonomy. I’d worked at small startups in the past, and enjoyed the pace of them. Shortly after my start date, mass layoffs began to spring up across our industry, which challenged our team in new ways. While I continued to work on a daily product design tasks and a long-term strategy, I also worked alongside the founders and head of product on a research task force. I contributed to the creation of a research plan and interviewed people from various industries — learning how they worked and how we might reposition ourselves in an ever-changing market. I also picked up some Webflow chops and redesigned our marketing homepage.