With a tiny team and a building base of eager clients, our objective was always to learn leanly and execute quickly. From research interviews with employees, working sessions with clients (Visit Scotland, Brewdog and Royal London to name a few) and utilising FullStory to regularly measure engagement, observe user experiences and track key metrics, we captured wants, needs and challenges in order to prioritise what to build next. Working daily with our product manager and our team of back-end and front-end developers, I followed each design from discovery to delivery for both our app and business dashboard.
One of the first features I delivered was teams and leaderboards. This feature was designed to create friendly competition between departments, business units or however a business divided its employee base. Leaderboards had a huge impact on engagement, with team leaders sharing results in team meetings to encourage participation and celebrate collective impact.
The introduction of teams boosted engagement rates by 120%. VisitScotland saw 7x more actions completed when leaderboards were added.
Sprints is a feature that enables businesses to curate a list of actions from the Pawprint database to focus employee efforts within a time-boxed challenge.Businesses used this tool to align employee engagement with their sustainability goals and to boost awareness of the Pawprint app and their wider sustainability strategy. By comparing Sprint data, businesses can learn what resonated with their employees and what didn’t in order to boost effectiveness of future activity.
Running a Sprint increased actions by 18% on average.
With the sustainability in business landscape changing rapidly and with a sound prediction that emissions reporting would quickly evolve from a nice-to-have to compulsory, we focused on enabling businesses to capture their Scope 3 emissions data. Scope 3 emissions is notoriously difficult to estimate based on the complex nature of what it covers yet it is critical to measuring progress towards Net Zero and other sustainability goals. Aligned with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, I created an incentivised, jargon-free Scope 3 emissions survey with sound logic to create an appealing, quick and understandable experience with a high completion rate.
We learned quickly that it was important for businesses to be able to compare themselves to other businesses. I designed the benchmarking feature for the business dashboard, enabling the anonymous comparison of one businesses’s progress to other Pawprint businesses across the key sustainability goal categories. To launch this new feature, we created Top of the COP, a timely COP27 business-to-business competition to encourage app engagement and boost the number of actions tracked. This took the form of a website and a comms campaign that I designed and executed using Webflow and Canva. I also hosted a Webinar to boost awareness of the COP27 campaign and the new feature.
Working as the sole digital designer at a start-up for 19 months has had an exceptional impact on my ways of working when approaching UX and UI projects. I pride myself, and always have, on my ability to design digital experiences that look and feel beautiful - however, working so closely with the Pawprint tech team has solidified my ability to balance beauty with feasibility. In this role I perfected my documentation skills and ways of working with the dev team, as well as learning how to effectively take the whole team on the UX/UI journey.
*(That’s the same as 359 individual’s yearly carbon footprints in the UK)
