Helping employees see where to grow.

From an LMS to a talent management product.

In late 2016, Josh Coates — our CEO at Instructure — came to the Bridge team wanting to expand Bridge's reach from just an LMS into a talent management product.

We were handed a white paper from Gartner and told to do some research that first week. As a design and product team, we had just validated our product and needed to move on to building an alpha. Instructure was expanding its Bridge platform from a sleek learning management system into a new product that would later be called Bridge Perform — an employee performance management solution. We built it from scratch and brought it to market within a year.

I was fortunate to work with a scrappy little team of four designers. Within that year we built Bridge Perform, with constant feedback as one of our main goals — not just an annual 360 review. After we validated the product, I was asked to lead design for everything associated with the Skill Assessment tool.

Would you pay for this?

As a product team, we took our prototype to various companies. We showed them the new product, tested it with them, gathered feedback, and asked the direct question: if this were a real product, would you pay money for it?

A lot of companies said they'd pay for it right now — and we often had to explain, again, that this was just a prototype with no code written yet. A few said they wouldn't pay at the moment but would be very interested once it was ready. That's the signal you want before you build.

Three roles, one skill system.

There were multiple roles to design for — and each needed a different view of the same reality.

HR admins needed a high-level peek into what was going on across the company. Managers needed to request assessments for their direct reports and themselves. Employees needed to request assessments for themselves, take assessments, and view their own results. The goal: an assessment tool that empowered companies, teams, managers, and individuals to see where training, growth, and hiring needed to happen.

I led every facet of the design.

I coordinated and led all facets of design — information architecture, user task flows, interaction, visual, product, and prototyping. I also conducted the research using the directed discovery method: voice-of-the-customer interviews, customer preference testing through prototyping, and customer confirmation testing across a number of iterations before delivering the final feature.

A deeply collaborative culture.

I knew that to succeed we'd need a process that let us deeply understand the user's needs, validate, and iterate. I collaborated closely with my product manager on the skill assessment feature, and together we brainstormed and whiteboarded through several possible solutions.

Instructure has a highly collaborative culture and an amazing team of smart, talented people. Once a week, all product managers and product designers get into a room to review and give feedback on one another's work.

Designing for three experiences.

From our initial interviews and brainstorms, we developed our assumptions about who we were designing for.

Getting feedback early and often.

Wireframing out ideas to get quick feedback always helps me figure out the direction I need to go. I shared early concepts — around the team dashboard and requesting an assessment — with the rest of the design team. There needed to be a dashboard where managers could see their direct reports, a way to invite team members to assess their teammates, and a way to take the assessment. Things evolved and changed over time.

Bridge was highly collaborative, and weekly design reviews with both the design and product teams gave us outside perspective — being on a project long enough starts to introduce bias. Meeting with customers really helped us simplify what we were creating.

I'm a firm believer in iterating to evolve.

I created a robust prototype in Sketch and InVision to test our designs with users. Weekly design critiques and meetings with customers gave us the feedback and insights we needed. Most of the time our assumptions were close — but we always learned something while user-testing.

Concept to alpha in a year.

After working through the designs for each part of the application, we finally arrived on the direction we wanted. It took a total of a year from concept to alpha and beta releases for the talent management platform we called Bridge Perform. It was a great feat — and something to be happy and relieved about.

Our final design let every role see the same skill reality from its own angle — admins configuring, managers assessing, employees growing — turning assessments into something people could actually act on.

One system, seen from every seat.

I believe a smooth handoff and tight collaboration with development is crucial to the success of every product. Knowing this was a very large feature, I wanted to be as prepared as possible. Once we had further validated the solution, I fleshed out every detail of the experience, reviewed the designs with our development team for technical input, and put together a comprehensive set of specifications to accompany the mockups and clickable prototype — an approach that has helped me, time and again, streamline development and raise the quality of the final result.