Keep It Simple, Silly!
The K.I.S.S principle forms the bedrock of minimalism. As a design movement, minimalism came to the fore in the visual art of post-WWII America. It is a style of design that sheds all of the excesses, only to retain elements that are most essential.
This translates into a stark reduction of form, colors, and space to attain a level of utmost simplicity — without compromising its impact.
Think Airbnb. Think Peloton.
Did an enterprise OKR product even cross your mind? Probably not.
The concept of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) isn’t just about capturing and projecting goals. It is a framework that provides a way for companies to align their quarterly goals with their most important priorities. However, what isn’t always recognized is that OKRs are key to influencing a cultural and behavioral shift in organizations.
Existing enterprise OKR systems tend to be bloated, with a ton of bells and whistles. They fall short of meeting user expectations, with their rigid functionality and outdated UI, and are often part of a bouquet of admin-management systems. This is what makes OKRs a complex task for employees who struggle with drafting them as per the guidelines.
With user adoption and engagement becoming important metrics for enterprise products, we at Koru in collaboration with our client, Ayraa.io, focused on taking a proactive approach to ensure user-first design. The idea was to remove two of the biggest barriers users encounter — the difficulty in drafting goals accurately and ensuring they are approved and followed.
We set out to design an enterprise OKR platform that
- Offered a seamless and minimal, yet efficient UI
- Enabled individuals to draft their own Objectives accurately and with ease
- Helped gain approval for them in minimal time
- Enabled tracking of progress through visual, intuitive mediums
- Let users gain ownership of their mission and contribution to the company
We applied the principles of Minimalism and leveraged content and visual hierarchy to guide the user through the workflow by subconsciously driving their focus over the path directed by logic, reflecting a spectacular amalgamation of design and code.
The minimalist design strategy aims to simplify interfaces by removing unnecessary elements or content that do not support user tasks. However, if followed rigidly it stands the risk of creating a product that has low information density and poor discoverability.
How do designers combat this while sticking to the concept of ‘less is more’? Thus, rather than having the user explore and wonder what they must do, we ensured that the UI was built around guiding them to take the right actions.
In doing so, we ensured that we,
- Retained only the most essential and necessary components and features to ensure that the user’s focus is trained on one task at a time, whether drafting a new KPI or making edits to the original ones.
- Designed the UI with a calm and inviting appearance based on the principles of neumorphism and glassmorphism to make users feel comfortable and at ease.
- Used a soothing color palette that is easy on the eyes and allows for a distinct definition of actionable components leveraging design styles with contrast.
- Created enough white space for the user’s attention to be focused on the primary subject on the screen. Getting rid of distractions lets users focus on a minimum number of tasks, which increases the chances of better output.
The platform’s intuitive AI-powered assistant was designed to aid users with the most tedious task — that of drafting meaningful Objectives. The assistant discreetly proffers help to the users in drafting KPIs smartly and efficiently. It offers logical suggestions to build KPIs, doing much of the heavy lifting associated with the task. It brings value by enabling users to make a habit of keeping key results updated, trustworthy, and actionable, and helps understand the patterns around success and failure over time.
Never before had an enterprise OKR platform been designed with a complete focus on ease of use to boost productivity and participation. This project won the iF Design Award 2023 in the User Interface category.
Read the full article here
