S
Feedback hub
A communication plan for performance growth and operation.
Context
Namely is an HR management platform. We faced low user engagement during the pandemic. In 2022, leadership prioritized optimizing the entire platform—starting with performance platform.
Role
As leading designer, I helped turn that mission into strategy and execution by partnering with stakeholders, driving rapid iterations, delivering the refined solution and designing for the future.
Timeline
2023-2024
Team
PM, Dev, Design
Skills
Product Design
Product Strategy
Stakeholder managementInteractive prototypingUser research & testing
+30%
User Engagement
+50%
Operational Efficiency
+18%
Performance Rating
Navigate the shift
Spot the gap: continuous communication
Analyzing the market shift with the team, I found out our legacy performance platform had low engagement as user expectations evolved past static annual reviews. The modern workforce demands continuous performance alignment—they require constructive feedback, real-time coaching, and conflict resolution in their daily work, not siloed in an annual process. This created a critical gap: existing communication tools like Slack were not designed for that goal.
Learnt from that, we had to respond quickly and strategically.
Reinvent communication in the performance world
One of the biggest challenge was designing a new framework that bridges communication and performance. I did several things:
Ground in user insight
I partnered with our researcher to run user sessions to understand what existing communication tool user value the most. The results were clear & surprising: people loved the social post channel over external tools like Slack. But that channel was only a good anchor point because it wasn’t designed for end-to-end communication. I needed to explore a new feature.
Rapid prototyping
I led the discovery workshops and built early prototypes. This process helped me explore and rapidly discard several heavy but complex options. Through iterative testing, we decided that a simple real-time feedback feature integrated into the existing social post channel—was the best fit for quick adoption and utility.
Design new framework
That clarity provided me the direction of a new framework, where I started jointing everything. The final framework was a new continuous communication channel with public social posts and end-to-end real-time feedback. Meanwhile, by expanding the channel to the core performance workflow(for example reference to annual review), we were able to boost performance growth and user engagement.
Continuous communication channel at homepage
Continuous communication channel at profile page
Channel integration into the performance workflow as reference to support precise, goal oriented review.
Craft and elevate the feedback experience
Make people better managers
Another interesting challenge was designing feedback experience for managers as feedback is mainly a management practice. Focusing on manager’s feedback quality will drive more meaningful growth than simply encouraging volume. From research, we found 44% managers were giving poor feedback - that’s the key signal to move forward.
As a complete feedback loop includes feedback creation and response, I explored consistent solutions for both. It took multiple rounds of user testing and many iterations to evolve. The final result was the preset template.
Use template to help managers quick start and write a structured feedback with high quality.
Recommend pathways to reply properly and continue the conversation.
Design for maturity
Scale the channel to a hub
After launch, we spotted many unpleasant experience. Although there was notification bell, users lost track of messages as feedback quickly piled up, and managers had to jump between profiles to manage team feedback and gather insights. I was determined to make our service matured.
As Namely began developing its all-inclusive platform in 2024, I addressed these issues of noise and fragmentation by scaling the communication channel into a robust Feedback Hub.
An all-in-one feedback hub with notifications, insights, filters and cross-linking actions.
Design for future
Make writing fun with AI
As the rise of Large Language Models, we needed to get ready to evolve with the growing demands of AI-powered support. We defined writing and summary experience for the 1st round as they were the essentials in user’s daily work. I was tasked to explore a scalable solution that we can implement throughout the whole Namely platform, old and new. And here came the plug-in style AI tool.
Help me write better! Plug-in style writing tool to help rewrite with goals, tones, length and much more.
Tell me what to do! Summary tool helps digest the feedback and respond in a more thoughtful way.
Reflection
What I wanted to show you
I love bringing complex, business-critical projects to life — without losing sight of soul, fun, or creative opinion. Even at scale, I believe the little “just because” details still matter.
What I learned…
This product impacted hundreds of thousands of customers, and I spent countless hours personally responding to their frustration. One of the biggest takeaways was learning how to balance resistance to change with genuine pain points, and reacting accordingly.
What I could do better
Looking back, I could have better balanced value between managers and employees. Earlier versions focused too much on manager but after feature launched, we received many request from employees that they need request feedback features. Secondly, embedding contextual prompts into daily workflows—like Slack nudges or meeting recaps—would have made feedback more seamless and integrated into everyday work.