Background
Employment benefits range from pensions to medical insurance to workplace education, and can even cover perks like discounts in restaurants, or free access to mindfulness apps. Many businesses offer a range of benefits, but few are optimised and often employees are not even aware of what they’re entitled to or enrolled in.
The market for employee benefits is as competitive as it is varied. This makes it challenging for businesses who are buying to find the right benefits for their employees, and challenging for businesses who provide employee benefits programmes to reach their intended audience.
The project
Clients Elliott and Neil were already well underway with helping businesses address this problem. Their challenge was the way that they were capturing data from employers - cold calling and getting them to fill out a lengthy questionnaire. They needed an efficient way to uncover business's current situation and identify where they could help them improve.
We had a very clear picture of what we wanted to achieve but lacked the technical experience and expertise on how to actually deliver this.
Elliott Smith, Co-founder, Love Your Employees
Love Your Employees approached Bad Dinosaur to help them digitise their benefits questionnaires using a web app. This would streamline their process by forgoing cold calling and allowing potential customers to go through the questionnaire on their own, without the need for extra people to run through it.
The platform allows businesses to review their existing employee benefits and benchmark their offering against their industry peers. It also doubles as a marketplace, helping businesses discover what new and innovative employee benefits are available. Ultimately, the platform helps stop businesses overspending on under-utilised programmes, and optimises businesses’ existing benefit offerings.
Before going into a full build of the project, Love Your Employees opted for a clickable prototype. A clickable prototype is the interface of an application that can be clicked through as if it were an actual application, but with no data persistence and no back-end functionality. It’s a great way of getting something into potential customers’ and investors’ hands to test appetite for an idea, and it’s a great way of prioritising which features to build when development starts.
At no point had we considered creating a clickable prototype, something that Bad Dinosaur suggested early on. This was a great way for us to understand what could be achieved and take this to potential end users, partners and/or investors.
Elliott Smith, Co-founder, Love Your Employees
Storyboarding
The first step of any project at Bad Dinosaur is storyboarding. This is our way of quickly sketching out how a user would flow through an application. The aim of this exercise is to reach a shared understanding with the client about how they envision their application to work.
Our designers hand draw a sketch showing all functionalities and flows that we expect from an application. The outcome of this exercise is a shared understanding between the client and Bad Dinosaur. By not launching straight into high fidelity designs we don’t waste time designing any features we’re not sure of.
Visuals and aesthetics
As an established business, Love Your Employees came equipped with an existing logo and marketing website set up. They were happy for the designers at Bad Dinosaur to use this as a starting-point and work with it to create the Love Your Employees aesthetic.
Using the “love” theme of the name and the matchmaking nature of the application, we chose a pink colour to use throughout. A set of custom designed icons were created, playing on the love theme throughout by including love hearts and other nods to the love theme. The overall tone of the brand through the application was cheeky and lighthearted.
Collaboration
Every week Love Your Employees would meet with their designer, Lindsay in Bad Dinosaur’s Edinburgh office for a co-design session. By meeting weekly they were able to quickly give feedback through the course of the project, in the meeting and afterwards once they were given the latest release to view.
The weekly sessions were of great value, we were able to see progress firsthand and easily give our feedback/input.
Elliott Smith, Co-founder, Love Your Employees
During the last week of the project Neil from Love Your Employees came into the Bad Dinosaur office to collaborate with Lindsay to make some finishing touches. This was a great way to save on time spent going back-and-forth through emails.
Development
At the beginning of 2020 Love Your Employees were ready to start planning the development phase of their project, having successfully used the clickable prototype to gain interest from their partners.
Love Your Employees came in for a workshop session with Bad Dinosaur where they brought forward new ideas and developments that they discovered from testing their clickable prototype. From this session Bad Dinosaur were able to estimate the full development phase of the project.
The full version of the Love Your Employees has since been developed and launched by Bad Dinosaur, and further work is ongoing.
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