Attention Economy in UKG Ready: The Latest Updates and How We Got There

In today’s episode, we are delighted to have two special guests, Malini Rao, Senior Director of User Experience Research, and Chris Beebe, a Manager of Product Management for UKG Ready, join us today. Tune in to learn about:

• What attention economy is
• How attention economy influenced the recent changes in UKG Ready
• The upcoming changes and what you can expect moving forward

For additional customer content, please check out the UKG Ready Release Readiness page.

Transcript

0:00:00 In today’s world, we are constantly moving and multi-tasking, and our attention is being pulled in so many different directions. According to the writer and research fellow at the University of Virginia, Matthew Crawford, attention is a resource and a person only has so much of it. But what happens when that attention is forced to focus on several different items at one time? Stay tuned to find out. 

[Musical intro]

00:37:12 AMANDA: Hi everyone and welcome to the Working Smarter Café Podcast. I’m your host, Amanda Boyle, and I’m excited to be joined by my two guests, Malini Rao, Senior Director of User Experience Research and Chris Beebe, Manager of Product Management for UKG Ready.

00:52:22 They’re here to talk to us about Attention Economy within UKG Ready. Since the August release, you might have noticed some changes in your UKG Ready solution. We have been hard at work seeking to provide a user experience that is crisp, clear, and ultimately helps you do your job. All of these changes fall under the umbrella of Attention Economy. 

01:14:24 I’m going to hand it over to Chris and Malini to share more on the importance of Attention Economy and how it’s played a big role in the UKG Ready solution.

01:23:23 CHRIS: Thank you so much for having us Amanda! Hey everyone, this is Chris Beebe. So happy to be with you here today. Malini and I are so excited to share our thoughts today about some exciting updates that have come to the Ready product suite user experience. Some that have recently occurred as well as what we will have coming up over the next few releases. Now some of you, hopefully, may be excited for what these updates may be. I am sure many of you are sitting back and going, "oh no! More changes." Trust me! Trust us. We hear you. Today, what we wanted to do is share the rationale and thought process behind these changes that we’ve seen recently. And we really want to assure you that we will keep our eyes and ears open for your feedback and partnership all along the way.

02:15:20 So as you look at software trends overall, especially when it comes to the user interface, they tend to evolve every 3-5 years or so. And, funnily enough, it has been almost three years since we fully launched our new UI, with our desktop experience matching with our mobile app. But the changes that we have coming to Ready are not necessarily just keeping up with trends. Having said that, the trend of making business applications feel more like everyday consumer applications is not purely about aesthetics but it's about making the complex tasks accessible, and simpler, for people by meeting them where they are in terms of their expectations of software, again, from both the desktop and the mobile experience. This is a universal goal that we absolutely share. 

03:12:20 MALINI: In 2021-22, we actually mapped the journey of Ready customers with our Heart of the Customer initiative, and having those in-depth conversations with all of those customers, we learned a ton. In this study and consistently across many other research studies as well, Ready customers have told us that it feels like Ready is built for large customers with many more dedicated people for different functions to support their workforce. In contrast, we also learned in our, the Ready, context, admins and practitioners often wear multiple hats and are super busy multi-tasking constantly. They are overloaded and challenged and they experience frequent interruptions. This makes the handholding or sometimes doing actions on behalf of their employees and managers in the system a very large but inevitable burden, especially on these Ready champions. With this in mind, we decided to make it our top priority to address both the main issues here: 1.) Making the product experience more warm, approachable, friendly and human for our workforce to need less support from their expert users and 2.) also addressing the cognitive load of multi-tasking expert users in our system. Curiously, a lighter and more consumer-friendly interface actually helps solve both these issues.

04:51:26 Now before I dive into the specifics, let us briefly consider some research insights around human cognition and this concept called Attention Economy. The concept of Attention Economy was first developed by Herbert Alexander Simon, an American economist, political scientist, and cognitive psychologist in 1971. Simply put, digital products are competing for our users' limited attention and one of the most important aspects of great digital experiences is that it focuses your attention on what matters they most to you in that context.

05:36:07 Hey Chris, I am sure you have played the game 'I spy'. 

05:39:24 CHRIS: I have! It's a lot of fun but sometimes it feels like finding a needle in the haystack.

05:45:11 MALINI: Exactly! In these games, the complexity increases as the number of things that you have to spot your item amidst increases and the space, or how crowded something is, between these objects decreases. This is because the human brain is best at focusing on one primary task at a time and an insight from cognitive psychology is that the time to make decisions increases exponentially with the number of choices. So, it doesn't matter if the choices are relevant or are mostly distractions as in the case of the I spy game, right? The efficiency to spot your items decreases and takes more time. 

06:29:17 Similarly in Ready, this can happen when lots of widgets offer lots of insights and options at the same time and are all vying for your attention as in the case of our dashboards, for example. Or maybe we expose so many reports on the dashboard instead of summaries or insights. So, this is an example of a use case where we try to make some optimal trade-offs between the number of clicks, the amount of white space compared to content, so that you have more ready-to-consume summaries that may put the detail, maybe, one click away.

07:08:15 The contrary is also true. Do you remember the 'Invisible Gorilla' experiment that went viral on the Internet several years ago, Chris? 

07:19:00 CHRIS: Right, that’s the one where we had a group of volunteers that had to keep track of how many times some basketball players were tossing a ball in a video and then you had someone in a gorilla suit walking across the court, in plain view, plain sight, but many of the volunteers failed even to notice that.

07:36:23 MALINI: Yes, that's the one. That was the one that a Harvard research group did the original experiment, I think there have been many, many variations after that. Why people missed the gorilla in this experiment is because of a phenomenon called 'inattentional blindness'. This is when you miss big and obvious things when you are hyper-focused on a task. In Ready, it's possible that you would miss an important time-sensitive notification around open enrollment, for example, because you are focused on some primary tasks on the busy dashboard. To address this, we are actually saving some empty space near the dashboard tabs so that when that space is temporarily filled with important information, it has a much higher chance of being noticed especially when it comes in through some animation. 

08:32:24 CHRIS: So Malini, in the process of these visual simplifications, are we impacting efficiency for our multi-tasking power users and practitioners?

08:43:12 MALINI: Not really. Per information processing theories and cognitive science, multi-tasking actually interferes with attention and working memory and it negatively affects performance, comprehension, self-regulation, accuracy, and efficiency. Having said that, we are not proposing a one-size-fits-all experience strategy. While we design for attention economy for ALL users of Ready, because it’s useful for everyone, we will be tailoring to personas and use cases as well. And while we focus on walk up and use experiences for employees with little or no learning curve, we will still be designing for efficiency for power user personas like admins and practitioners who use Ready every day. 

09:34:18 It’s important to note that it is quite common for humans to perceive their efficiency differently than how efficient they really are. So, besides the comments and feedback we hear from our customers on Community and in research studies, we also try to track a variety of indicators in our research studies like time on task. We try to use eye-tracking heat maps. We also measure perception of ease before and after somebody completes a task, error rates etc. So these are all the different ways in which we would also look at efficiency. We also track overall satisfaction with a universal experience metric called System Usability Score or the SUS. We do this every quarter at scale with thousands of responses from our real users through in-product feedback. So far our SUS scores have been tracking really well in the positive direction for the last four quarters. 

10:35:22 So, talking about power users, I also want to mention a research study we did recently around our Attention Economy-related changes. We engaged over 120 admins, managers, and partners. Together these represent existing Ready customers and non-customers. And then we showed them the old dashboard, the new dashboard released in the August release, and a future version with some more changes. Our researcher gauged visual appeal with the toolkit Microsoft Desirability aka Product Reaction Cards. So in this the user chooses five words to describe the screen they just saw from a list. 

11:26:01 Interestingly, the number of negative words decreased across all user types for the August release version and there were no negative words in the top seven words that they chose by all users for the future vision. It's also interesting that the number one word chosen for the old and the August release versions was 'overwhelming' – and remember most people in this study were power users! So it is overwhelming – the cognition load—is true, even for power users. Thankfully, the most common word used to describe the future vision was 'straight forward' which gives us the confidence that we are on the right track. We will still be running other studies to measure usability and efficiency for those personas and for those use cases but I think we feel confident that we are on the right track when it comes to cognition load and its impact on how friendly and approachable something looks even for power users.

12:30:19 CHRIS: Yeah I think that makes a lot of sense, especially when we talk about the density of content. However, it seems like the color is being drawn back a lot from the Ready screens. Is there a particular reason for this?

12:44:17 MALINI: Yes, there is a reason but I , first of all, want to assure you that this is a step towards an eventual vision that again it will be warm, friendly, and also colorful. But before getting into color piece a little bit more, I want to take a step back and explain some of the visual levers that we use to address the various details around attention economy. So, we use color, space, font, and content density to ensure just the right things on the screen catch your attention and also to help orient the relative relationships of the elements on the screen. 

13:26:25 For example, we will reduce the color contrast for less important items on the screen to help users maintain better a focus on the data or task at hand on a given screen. Today, in the Ready dashboard, a bevy of blue icons and links all hankering for the user's attention. We are now trying to be more deliberate in how we use color and font size. And color is a very important and powerful way to direct attention. We are also acknowledging that there are other affordances in our everyday digital experiences that tell us what is clickable and what is not and we don't need everything to be blue, for example. We are also stripping out some of the color in some places to make room for future enhancements like colorful illustrations that will bring warmth and personality to our product experience. So, we definitely are on a journey and we are taking baby steps towards that vision and measuring along the way. We are also hoping that most of these changes will be small enough and feel natural enough for you to not have to make huge adjustments each time.

14:44:11 CHRIS: Absolutely. This has indeed been a journey for us and we have had some lessons learned throughout. So, pre-2019, just to frame a little bit of history, we were kind of working with an outdated UI from the desktop experience and an extremely outdated mobile app with limited functionality. To say we had our work cut out for us was an understatement! So, our goal was to bring more functionality and power to users through the mobile experience and therefore required us to update every place that managers and employees touch. We essentially had to make changes to every single one of these screens…our reports, our detailed input pages, timesheets, and more were all affected—so that was quite the challenge.

15:35:29 It did not come without some hiccups and lessons learned. Due to the scale of the change, there was a significant impact to our existing customer base. We tried a rip off the band-aid approach in some of these areas and that was met with mixed results. Certainly, a big factor in that was time to just digest the changes, and it really depended on where the changes were happening. 

16:02:19 Through this process over time, we’re a little bit more focused on our efforts and an example of this is one of the later pieces that we made a major change to was the employee profile. This is a highly used area of the product for managers to keep their employees’ records up to date. For this, we tried a successive rollout approach that was a bit less radical than before but large enough that we offered a toggle that allowed managers to switch back and forth from the old view to the new view. We also had a feedback system that was in place that was monitored between ourselves on the product team, our UX design team, and our engineers. Both available from an outside survey and then eventually providing feedback within the product itself. 

16:52:15 The team met weekly on this, working through feedback and adjusting priorities for these items that were bubbling up to the top. Given the frequency of our releases, we were able to make pivots to our process that could very rapidly be felt by the user base. Really get those highly impactful changes out in a much quicker manner. And it really solidified the way in which we all work together for the better.

17:20:26 We found a successful approach that allowed us to iterate and really partner with our customers. So, when it came time to applying the Attention Economy methodology, we knew that we had to apply an even more careful and iterative approach for changes; even more so than before. So as Malini mentioned, we first looked at highly impactful areas that any users review when they first log—namely the dashboard.

17:50:00 Malini, you discussed earlier the details and methodology behind our approach to the dashboard, but the outcome was to design a visual refresh that was meant to boost both work efficiency and provide a more user-friendly interface that was simple, focused, and personalized. We released this back in August and I’m happy to say that the overall response has been very positive.

18:14:12 MALINI: Absolutely! It’s also important to note that although we have reduced the visual noise through various means such as adjusting spacing, color contrast, and many other visual details. We have not in fact made any changes to the data itself on the dashboard widgets. So, the level of detail is still intact, just a little easier to digest.

18:39:02 Also, one warmer change we made is that when users first login, there is now a greeting message that is more welcoming and personal. This recognizes the time of day for your location and even welcomes you back for repeated logins. This replaces static information about the person logged in that does not update terribly often. That information is still there for reference, it’s just tucked into the profile menu in the top right of the screen.

19:11:28 CHRIS: Very good point. We have also improved and made strides in terms of the channels in which we are communicating changes. Using more messages that are in the product itself including readyConnect, pop-up announcements, providing updates through videos and Community posts, and of course maintaining our release notes for focused documentation around each release.

19:40:01 Now Malini, that is not all we released back in August. Could you also talk a little about the menu updates that were made?

19:47:00 MALINI: Yes! Definitely not something to leave out. With the menu, we wanted to provide more of an aesthetic appeal that is decluttered and clean so that customers have an improved experience as their eyes flow from one sub-menu to another. The left-side of the menu now features more prominent icons, that provide better visual cues for finding major functional areas. Also, ‘Favorites’ has been upgraded, given its own section that is accessible from both the ‘My Info’ and ‘My Team’ tabs for greater convenience. The location of items within the menu itself have not changed.

20:32:22 CHRIS: It’s exciting stuff! I have heard from so many customers who absolutely love the menu updates. Okay, so what’s next you might be asking? Well, coming in the October release, we have updates being made to icons throughout the system—particularly the colors moving from blue to gray. This lays the groundwork for future work that you referenced earlier where we add color back in with a purpose. Users will mostly see the impact mainly on report line item icons, look-up field icons, and more.

21:09:23 Then as we look ahead to the first half of this next fiscal year of 2024, we have more changes planned that, again, are more iterative in nature. Since we started very high level with the dashboard structure, our plan is to zoom in slightly to focus on some of the widgets themselves. Some adjustments will be very subtle. For example, the Sticky Notes widget has some slight changes to the color, changes to the border, again, a very subtle change. While others we are exploring more of a format change. An example of this is the documents widget that you can add to the dashboard, which today, looks more like a report and which can be very hard to see and manage the data in a clear manner, especially from the mobile experience. So things that we want to change there, again, won’t impact the behaviors that you can apply and the functions you perform in those widgets, they’ll just be restyled slightly in a form that is more clear. 

22:23:12 Speaking of reports, we also plan to do work towards making the chart portion of reports more in line with what we have from a dashboard perspective as it ties back to the padding in between those tiles, font consistency, color consistency, etc. 

22:44:22 We are so thrilled to bring these updates to our customers! We can’t wait to show and tell you more. We hope this sneak peek into our vision and rationale around visual simplification and attention economy gives you the confidence that UKG is committed to making Ready work harder and better for our customers with the aim of having a positive impact on all key user types from admin to employee. Throughout this process, we want to hear from and engage with our customers all through the way. We encourage everyone to reach out to us via UKG Community, submit ideas, and participate with our in-product feedback options that periodically run. Thank you so much for your time with us!

23:37:17 AMANDA: Thank you both so much for diving in. 

23:39:13 CHRIS: Of course! We’re so happy to have joined.

23:41:22 AMANDA: Understanding the “why” really puts things into perspective and it’s great to have the inside scoop on how that research and feedback helped define how we approached this for our Ready product. 

23:51:02 CHRIS: We are so thrilled to continue sharing the enhancements that are coming next

23:55:09 AMANDA: For more information on Attention Economy and upcoming enhancements, head over to the UKG Ready Release Readiness page. There you’ll find a new Ease of Use tab that contains all the latest resources. 

24:07:13 I’m Amanda at the Working Smarter Café, thank you for listening with us today.