Caroo makes employee appreciation easy

As a contract designer at Caroo, I oversaw the end-to-end design process of the platform’s digital recognition wall, a virtual card feature that lets employees remotely send messages, GIFs, and videos to coworkers.

Timeline
Sept - Dec 2021

Role
Product Designer

Impact
Currently in development

Context

Caroo creates custom corporate gift boxes

HR administrators can send gift boxes to employees for occasions like onboarding, birthdays, and work anniversaries.

However, many customers use Caroo as one time users. In other words, something about the Caroo platform makes companies not use it as often as they should.

Research

How do people show their appreciation to their coworkers?

I consolidated dozens of customer interviews into an affinity map, conducted a competitive audit on Caroo’s top competitors, and worked with the product marketing manager to create realistic personas.

Pain points

Lack of customizability

It’s difficult to add a personal touch to online gifts.

No incentives to gift

Employees aren’t incentivized to join/use the Caroo gifting ecosystem, or they use the platform once for a specific gift and seldom come back.

Inefficient

Gifting is a back-and-forth process with many steps, so employees are forced to take extra steps to facilitate the gifting process.

After connecting with Chelsie, Caroo’s Chief Product Officer, we were able to consolidate the goals of this new feature to best help achieve Caroo’s overall business goals.

Goals

Make employee recognitions more meaningful

Motivate users to join the Caroo ecosystem

Increase lifetime value of customers

How receiving a Caroo gift box currently works

Currently, users interact very straightforwardly with Caroo for two primary reasons - sending a gift (for HR professionals) and claiming a gift (employee recipients). The process of receiving a gift on Caroo feels impersonal and robotic, as shown below.

Exploring ways to humanize the gifting process

I ideated ways to make the processes of gift giving & receiving feel more personal, especially given that most customer interviews mentioned recognition from immediate coworkers & managers were a lot more sentimental than recognition from upper management and HR.

People love personalized messages, even if they’re not close to that person

When figuring out which features to narrow in on, I took inspiration from other ways people show appreciation to each other. From our research, a common theme was personalized token of appreciation from your coworkers meant a lot more than generic messages from HR.

So, we decided to narrow down more on a social card feature, similar to Facebook posts.

This heartfelt birthday post from a childhood friend I haven’t spoken to years was a lot more memorable than generic “happy birthday!”s from people I talk to regularly.

Brainstorming potential user flows

To lessen engineering effort and ease user experience, the processes of creating and receiving the digital card need fit seamlessly into the existing gift box experience.

I explored multiple flows for each step & actor of the process, asking stakeholders for their thoughts on the most efficient flows.

Final solution

** Due to the nature of my NDA, I’m unable to share detailed images of my final solution.

Card creation

Adding a digital card is an optional, supplementary step to the gift-sending process - the feature easily integrates into the existing gifting experience flow.

Card contribution

Coworkers can add text posts, images, GIFs, contribute to a word cloud - there’s a plethora of potential post types that could be added to this feature as it scales.

Card collection

After claiming their physical gift box, recipients are shown their digital card.

Results

This feature is currently in development as of Feb 2022. I’ll update this page as the development of our MVP continues!