Guusto

New

Old

Guusto was in the midst of a data and technology migration when I joined the team and naturally, it was ripe for a UI refresh as well. The most notable transformation was the Dashboard.

From customer and internal sentiment, the original dashboard felt too transactional with a greater proportion of the screen real estate dedicated to monetary spending on recognition. After some competitor studies, what Guusto’s dashboard needed was greater hierarchy and emphasis on people, actionable ways to drive participation, and the spirit and celebration of recognition. While the dashboard is in a state of continuous improvement, new features or iterations I design would always stem from the idea of humanizing data.

Guusto’s primary feature is sending a digital gift card as a means for employees to express timely recognition for their peers or direct reports. Over time, multiple functionality has been added to support multiple user types sending a gift. Based on feedback received from multiple teams from Customer Success to Product, the experience of sending a gift had become cumbersome. I was tasked to lead the design overhaul for the send gift experience.

The send gift project had taken a departure from the initial intent in that the final solution had become an abridged version, known as the quick send, rather than an overhaul to the main send gifts feature. Thus, the metrics defined for the project have become less applicable. A month following the quick send launch, gift orders have been up 11% and traffic to the full send gift flow is down 18.4%.

Shoutouts is a redesign and improvement to Guusto’s past offering, the Nomination Box. The Nomination Box is positioned as a peer-to-peer program where employees can "nominate" or recognize their colleagues for a job well done, usually for reasons that align to company core values. It operates within a closed ecosystem. In other words, employees can only nominate others who are loaded into Guusto as paid Team Members. Shoutouts still supports a peer-to-peer program, but has more flexibility by offering top-down manager-to-employee recognition that goes beyond reinforcing core values as managers may now send a "shoutout" for a special occasion, such as a birthday wish. As well, it is more scalable in that managers may send non-monetary recognition to just about anyone inside and outside the Guusto system and accommodates individuals regardless of their level of access to the internet.

Redesigning the platform is a daunting yet exhilarating endeavour, especially when I began as a team of 1. While I enjoy having accountability and ownership over product direction, what came with it was learning how to balance multiple stakeholder’s needs and interests. There were prospective customers looking for features, new customers signing large contracts and making their requests, existing customers to retain, a product roadmap to address, Engineering time to respect, departmental feedback, my own convictions in good design principles, and more recently, emphasizing with my intern and helping them navigate ambiguity and tradeoffs. Simultaneously, it is invigorating to distill the problem and abstractions, entertain and abandon possibilities, and put it together and present a concrete vision. Working at a start-up has been truly eye-opening as it has amplified ambiguity and the need to embrace the bigger picture. You could say I appreciate Guusto.