Pulse Feedback is an employee feedback tool that empowers people to advance their collaboration and themselves. It allows everyone to collect actionable employee feedback in real-time to get better at their jobs, strengthen team collaboration and create a working environment that fits their needs.

The challenge

When people give feedback, it's important to understand why they gave a particular rating. This is why comments are crucial. They allow people to explain the reasoning behind their feedback.

In Pulse Feedback we track the usage of comments by measuring the number of people who leave at least one comment and the average number of comments per person. Over the past years, we've seen a steady increase in those metrics. In this project we further wanted to encourage our users to write more constructive comments and increase those two KPI's.

The journey

When analysing our existing solution, we faced two major problems:

By changing the primary button «Next Question» from an inactive to an active state, users' attention is drawn to the button as soon as its state changes, rather than to the comment fields. Going to the next question would be the obvious thing to do.

Furthermore people may not be used to giving constructive feedback and simply don't know what or how to write. In the text fields we had static placeholder texts, which should help users write more constructive feedback. It was better than nothing, but we felt that there was still room for improvement.

Some simple ideas

During the ideation and concept phases, the team came up with several ideas. One of the simpler ideas was a simple gift illustration, based on one of our slogans "Feedback is a gift". That illustration would grow based on the length of a comment, as more feedback is a greater gift. The idea was discarded relatively early on due to lacking potential to reach our goal of increasing the number and length of constructive comments. At best, it would encourage people to write longer comments, but not to make them more constructive. Additionally, it would quickly become boring after a few repetitions.

An all new survey flow

One idea we took relatively far was a completely new survey flow. We separated the comments from the rating to give full attention to the comment in a distinct step and make active skipping necessary. Also, we added an activating question as placeholder text to get more constructive feedback and solved a few other known issues in the same move.

After testing the prototype with some users, it became evident that the new proposal was rather complex and eventually too dynamic. Participants were confused about the semi-automatic scrolling and the dynamic build-up.

The layout appeared overcrowded and we realised that we had unintentionally made the survey interaction much more complex than before. Since all these changes would also require significant amount of development, we decided to iterate further and try to come up with a more simple and lean solution.

The final result

Finally, we came up with the concept of dynamic placeholders. In each of the two comment fields (What I like, What I wish for), we showed questions that helped the users reflect more deeply about the topic and that gave them some ideas what they could write. These questions were changing depending on the given rating - hence the notion of dynamic placeholders. To keep the layout from getting cluttered and to direct the user's attention where we needed it, we simply replaced the static placeholders with those new questions. To top it off, we added a sleek animation that implied typing on a keyboard and would draw the attention immediately into the comment field.

The final solution resulted in a much simpler outcome than what we had envisioned during our ideation process. However, it proved to be very effective in solving our original challenge. Both of our comment KPIs improved significantly in the subsequent survey, showing that we had indeed reached our goal of increasing the number and length of comments written by our users.

Got curious about Pulse Feedback?

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