My experience of being a start-up founder is that most of the time it feels like this…

You start off having to play every instrument. Sales. Marketing. Product. Customer support. Tech. Finance. Design. Strategy.

And then you get to the stage where you can start to bring in people who actually know what they’re doing!

And boy does it feel nice.

The latest addition to the Youda crew is Matt Shearsmith who’s a fabulous UI designer. Matt’s joined us to help take the mobile and web app interfaces to the next level. We’ve tried our best, but this is where I got us to…

And this is where we are after Matt’s first week...

But Matt’s arrival is also forcing me to try and articulate the instincts and opinions I have on how the Youda UX should look and feel. Which isn’t always easy.

So I thought I’d take the opportunity in this newsletter to share my thinking and to ask for your feedback on what I see as the design principles that I’d like to inform the user experience of Youda.

Our emerging design principles

(If you’ve known me for a while, you’ll know that Simon Sinek is my nemesis so it really pains me to say this but…)

Let’s start with the 'why' - the purpose of Youda is to make people happier at work.

And by people we really mean front line workers.

So if we have to pick a side, we’re building for the end user (the front line employee and managers) not the head office. IMO one of the big problems in B2B tech is that the people who pay for it often aren’t the people who use it most — so they never have to live with the consequences of poor UX.

What I think that means in practice:

1. We want to challenge some of the underlying hierarchal assumptions that show up in products that were built with a command and control mindset. We’ve been having a lot of debate about ‘pinned’ messages at the top of newsfeeds this week! We obviously want front line teams to be engaged in messages from the centre, but we’re trying to create an architecture that nudges and helps head office people to communicate in a way that meets the communications needs of people who are using their mobile phone. So more video, audio and punchy slide shares. Less ‘here’s a pdf of a word document that you have to keep zooming in and out of to read’. Even more important is how we can facilitate more peer-to-peer collaboration, more social contagion and in particular how we can help customers capture more meaningful insight from front line employees. Amongst other things, I’m determined that Youda kills engagement surveys. There’s a book called Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal that’s had a big influence on my thinking about what vibrant, healthy and agile organisations look like. I won’t bore you to death by trying to summarise the book, save to say, McChrystal has this lovely concept of ‘shared consciousness’ and I think the big opportunity in most organisations is how they capture and harness insights from their customer facing teams to improve performance, and how they create a climate where employees can show up as authentic brand ambassadors with customers.
2. Youda is a ‘many right ways’ not a ‘one size fits all' product and we want users to be able to personalise their experience. We want Youda to enable more inclusive workplaces where the employee experience can respond to the different needs of different people. There’s some great stuff we can do in this space (e.g. making the app translate all content to my first language, allowing users to change the layout of their ‘My dashboard’, building ‘say my name’ functionality into profile views etc), but my favourite and most wacky idea is letting users choose the tone of voice and personality for their chatbot. Dub would like his Youda chatbot to talk to him like it’s Brian Blessed. I’d like mine to speak like Lego Batman.
3. Youda needs to live up to the expectations our users now have as a digital consumers. If you’re 19 and you’re joining a hospitality business, you’ve grown up with Netflix, TikTok and an iPhone. You have a certain expectation about how tech should look and feel. We’re going to keep pushing Youda so we can get to that sharpness, elegance and seamlessness of UX that marks out great consumer tech. Above all, it has to feel seamless and intuitive. The litmus test for me is: “would an employee want to take Youda with them if they left the company they worked for”.
4. But we’re also conscious that it’s the customer’s employee experience not ours. So we’re trying to find a design route that means we can create a great product, that we can scale (i.e. we can’t redesign the architecture for every customer), but which has space for customers to make it look and feel like their brand. We’re trying to make it easy to change colours, logos, fonts and photography, but the biggest scope is obviously with the agent experiences which are completely customisable. That means you can design your employee journey and HR processes to work exactly as you want them, and it means the bot can follow your brand tone of voice.
5. The final thing we’re trying to achieve is to establish Youda as be the ‘digital front door’ for your HR tech stack, so we’re thinking of ways we can make it easy for other tech suppliers to push information and notifications into Youda. That way the chatbot or the dashboard can tell you when your rota’s been published and what your shifts are. It can tell you when your tronc has been paid and how much it it. It can notify you when your next 1-1 chat is due. Youda won’t be able to manage every employee experience end-to-end, but we want employees to know they can find what they need, when they need it and get signposted to other apps if necessary.

If you’d like to help, I’d genuinely appreciate your feedback on the emerging principles that are informing what we’re building, things you think are important, examples of UI you think we could learn from etc. Just reply to this email and I'll pick it up.

And if you’re up for giving us feedback on the actual UI designs, we have a little WhatsApp group of volunteers where we post our work in progress. Again, please just let me know if you'd be up for taking part.

Thanks for your help and support.

Until next week (ish!)

Matt PS. If you know someone who might want to subscribe to this newsletter and follow our progress they can sign up here.