Dashboard

Helping managers turn employee feedback into meaningful action.

&frankly is an employee engagement platform that helps organizations measure workplace satisfaction through recurring pulse surveys. While the platform collected a wealth of valuable data, the dashboard made it difficult to quickly understand organizational health, identify trends, and determine where attention was needed. The objective of this project was to redesign the dashboard into a clear, insight-driven experience that enables users to move from simply viewing data to making informed decisions.

Product Design / UX Research / Information Architecture / Dashboard Design / Prototyping

2023

&frankly is part of Simployer, a Norwegian company specialising in HR management solutions and services.

Users and company hierarchy

Browse the gallery to explore the new dashboard layouts, highlights, customization, and filtering functionalities

The challenge:

Employee engagement dashboards must balance two competing needs: presenting enough information to support meaningful analysis while remaining simple enough for users to understand at a glance. The existing dashboard contained numerous metrics and visualisations, but lacked a clear visual hierarchy and a strong sense of context.

The redesign therefore went beyond improving the visual presentation of the dashboard. The goal was to transform it into a more flexible and actionable analytical tool, one that would help users understand not only what is happening, but also how their organisation compares, what is changing, where attention is needed, and what they can do about it.

The redesign focused on answering five fundamental questions as quickly as possible:

How engaged are employees overall?
Which areas or teams require attention?
How does engagement compare with relevant benchmarks?
How has engagement changed over time?
What can we do to improve results?

The dashboard serves multiple audiences, each with different goals:

HR professionals need a comprehensive overview of engagement across the organisation, allowing them to identify recurring patterns, compare departments and organisational segments, benchmark results against other companies, and monitor long-term improvements.
Managers are primarily interested in understanding the wellbeing and engagement of their own teams, recognising where intervention may be necessary, and tracking whether actions are having an impact.
Executives require a concise summary that communicates the overall health of the organisation, highlights areas of concern, and provides meaningful comparisons without overwhelming them with operational detail.

Despite their different perspectives, these users share a common need: transforming complex survey data into clear, contextual, and actionable insights.

Design principles:

Prioritise information: The most important metrics should be immediately visible. Overall engagement and key indicators become the visual entry point, allowing users to assess organisational health within seconds. The summary was redesigned to surface the most relevant positive and negative signals immediately, helping users pinpoint what is going well and what requires attention without having to interpret multiple charts first.
Provide context, not just numbers: Individual metrics become significantly more meaningful when paired with historical trends, benchmarks, or comparisons. The expanded benchmarking functionality allows users to compare their results across different scenarios, including departments, organisational segments, countries, and industries. This gives users a clearer understanding of whether a result is isolated or part of a broader pattern.
Make change visible: Understanding the current state is only part of the picture. The redesign introduced trend visualisation to make changes in engagement and key indicators easier to identify over time. Rather than requiring users to compare individual data points, trends provide an immediate sense of direction and help reveal improvements, deterioration, and emerging patterns.
Support different ways of working: Not every user needs to focus on the same KPIs. The dashboard was therefore designed to be configurable, allowing users to reconfigure the interface and decide which key indicators are most relevant to them. This shifts the dashboard from a fixed reporting page towards a more personalised analytical workspace.
Turn insight into action: The dashboard should not stop at identifying a problem. A new Insights section connects data with potential actions, providing suggestions on what users can do to improve their results. This creates a progression from understanding performance → identifying opportunities → taking action.
Support exploration: The dashboard encourages users to begin with a high-level overview before progressively exploring specific departments, dimensions, benchmarks, or time periods. This reduces cognitive load while still enabling deeper analysis when needed.

The solution:

The redesigned dashboard establishes a clear information hierarchy that guides users from broad organisational insights to detailed engagement analysis.

A new and more focused summary experience provides an immediate snapshot of organisational health. Key performance indicators are positioned prominently, while positive and negative signals are surfaced clearly so users can quickly understand where things are going well and where attention may be required.
Expanded benchmarking: One of the central goals of the redesign was to significantly expand the existing benchmarking functionality. Users can now explore their results across a broader range of comparison scenarios, including countries, industries, departments, and organisational segments. Supporting visualisations make these comparisons easier to interpret, helping users understand their position relative to relevant benchmarks rather than viewing their scores in isolation.
Trend visualisation: Trend visualisations were introduced to make changes over time easier to understand. Instead of relying on individual values, users can quickly identify whether engagement is improving, declining, or remaining stable, and use this context alongside benchmark data to interpret performance.
Configurable KPIs: The dashboard was also designed around the idea that different users have different priorities. Users can reconfigure the interface and select the KPIs they want to focus on, creating a more relevant overview of the information that matters most to them.
From data to insights: A brand-new Insights section extends the dashboard beyond reporting and analysis. Based on the engagement results, it highlights relevant findings and provides suggestions for potential actions that could help improve performance. This creates a more direct connection between the data and the decisions users need to make. Across the experience, charts were simplified to improve readability and consistency, while card layouts, spacing, typography, and colour usage were refined to create a lighter and more approachable interface. Interactive filtering allows users to move between departments, time ranges, countries, industries, and other organisational segments while maintaining the overall context of their analysis.

Workshop activity and layout configurations