ALIGNMENT | INTERNSHIP
Visualizing team alignment through an interactive dashboard
MY ROLE
Product Design Intern
TEAMMATE
Jim Benton (CEO)
TOOLS
Figma, Webflow
TIMELINE
Jun - Sep 2024
DESCRIPTION
A concept (later iterated & shipped!) of a quarterly team performance dashboard to improve customer leadership understand
CONTEXT
During summer 2024, I had the pleasure of working at Alignment as a Product Design Intern.
Alignment is a strategic collaboration platform that helps stay aligned by streamlining goal-setting, performance tracking, and decision-making, I worked on enhancing the usability and functionality of key enterprise tools.
After being onboarded, one of my first tasks was to conduct a UX audit of the platform. A primary issue that I found was within the connection within the 5-step Alignment Playbook
FINAL DESIGN PREVIEW
A single-page, all-inclusive dashboard
HYPOTHESIS
Teams were struggling with a disconnected Alignment Playbook workflow, leading to inconsistent adoption of a key Alignment offering.
The 5-step Alignment Playbook was positioned as the company's flagship quarterly system to help teams sync by setting goals, tracking progress, and reflecting on their outcomes to drive continuous improvement.
1
Mission
2
SWOT
3
OKR
4
Top 6
5
Retro
During my UX audit, I observed a critical problem: while there is a dedicated section for Alignment Playbook projects during creation, once the projects are created, there is no mechanism linking these projects together in the platform's interface or navigation.
Instead, these related projects—such as "2024 Q3 Exec Mission" or "2024 Q3 Exec SWOT"—exist as isolated items scattered among unrelated projects like "Exec Summer To-Do List" or "9/25 Meeting Agenda".
The Alignment Playbook steps weren't connected.
There was nothing in place to encourage the user to follow the steps sequentially. Even if they were to go through the effort of doing so, the platform didn't directly connect these projects together. Playbook steps would be grouped up with other random projects, with nothing communicating that they were part of a quarter's flow.
This disconnections means there's no visual or functional connection between the Playbook's projects after creation. This seemed like an issue for users and for the company.
Issue for users
Users face confusion trying to track related quarterly projects and successfully execute their quarter.
Issue for Alignment
The lack of cohesion reduces adoption of the Playbook, a workflow severely advertised by the company.
I presented my key findings to the team, emphasizing that the lack of cohesion between the steps in the Alignment Playbook. To better understand the root causes and user perspectives behind these issues, I next conducted in-depth user research with key stakeholders.
USER RESEARCH
Through interviews with key stakeholders from two customer companies, we uncovered pain points and an overlook gap in leadership visibility.
The primary goal was to better understand how users would interact with the Alignment Playbook workflow. Specifically, I aimed to identify points of friction in adopting the Playbook steps and uncover differences between leadership and team member's experiences.
Research Setup
Conducted 8 structured 1:1 interviews with key stakeholders across two close customers
Participants included both regular users (team members) and leadership
Sessions were held remotely, lasting about 30 minutes each
Insight #1: Playbook steps are loosely highlighted, but lose importance amongst other projects.
"We were told to follow the Playbook during our onboarding, but once you are in the platform, it just feels like another thing competing for attention." -team member
We confirmed one aspect of our hypothesis. For how much we were emphasizing the Playbook in our customer onboarding process and our marketing, it just felt like another of our many individual project templates on the platform.
Insight #2: Committed users have to mentally bridge the gaps between the Playbook steps because the platform doesn't visually connect them.
"Our leader is very insistent on following the Playbook, but it is a bit hard to remember what the next step is. Especially since some steps [Mission, SWOT, Retro] are only edited once and other steps [OKR, Top 6] are edited multiple times." -team member
Once again, our hypothesis that users were confused due to the lack of interconnectivity between Playbook steps was confirmed. What caught us by surprise was how much the varying levels of input required across different projects added to that confusion.
Insight #3: Leadership and HR lack a clear overview to proactively support team alignment and progress
"We want to help teams stay on track and use the Playbook, but there are some issues getting a big-picture view of what's happening on the platform with all of our teams. We have to manually check in with everyone and often find out about problems after it's become a major issue." -team leader
Despite their central role in driving organizational alignment, leaders and HR professionals struggle to monitor team progress through the Playbook due to limited visibility across projects and steps.
After uncovering these three major insights, we defined our two main user groups that we were designing for.
Team Members
track personal & team progress
understand priorities & focus areas
identify blockers & improvement areas
HR & Leadership
monitor overall team performance
identify struggling teams & offer support
align teams with company-wide goals
REFINED PROBLEM STATEMENT
The fragmented nature of the Playbook stalled adoption across teams and created blind spots for leadership, delaying necessary support until problems escalated.
DESIGN STRATEGY
Championing for a high-level dashboard that visualizes team progress and highlights their Playbook integration.
After validating and properly defining the problem, I questioned how I should begin to approach it. I came up with two possible design directions:
Determining Design Direction
Improving Navigation Between Steps
Potential idea: Persistent Navigation Component added to each step’s framework page
vs
Creating an External, High-level View
Potential Idea: An external Dashboard or Workspace-level Interface
While the first option would improve navigation at the framework level—a location users are already familiar with—it didn’t address the core issue of creating an overall cohesive experience or providing leadership with a strategic, high-level view.
Evaluating the tradeoffs, I determined that the second option would meet user and business needs by streamlining the entire Alignment Playbook in one place while also empowering leadership to monitor team performance and make data-driven decisions.
Key features
By synthesizing user research insights, the distinct needs of our two main user groups, and our chosen design direction, we identified the following key features as critical to the product:
1
Clearly linking individual projects together as part of the Quarterly Playbook
2
Visually highlighting adoption & engagement insights
3
Displaying all teams data on a singular page
VERSION 1
Beginning to visualize the playbook
During our initial calls with both customers, we had established that we would work hand-in-hand with them throughout the development of our dashboard feature. When we presented our first mockup, we discovered some issues:
Issue #1: Self-reported ratings were not a useful metric for projects
After completing a project (ex: SWOT Analysis), teams would be able to rate the individual parts of their project, giving them a high-level score (ex: 8.2). Originally, we used this score as the data populating the dashboard. However, this wasn’t reliable nor was it providing our users with useful and consistent data. Some teams rated themselves optimistically, while others were overly critical.
Iteration: Displaying success via project item count!
We switched from subjective ratings to project item counts, ensuring ratings were clear and data-backed measurements of engagement & adoption. A higher item count indicated a more comprehensive project--reflecting deeper alignment and team investment.
Issue #2: Dashboard organization didn't allow for quick team comparison
We discovered that HR & Leadership struggled with comparing performance across groups. While the bubbles nicely connected individual team’s Playbook rhythm, they failed to provide a quick way to evaluate multiple teams at once to analyze workspace-wide performance.
Iteration: Heatmaps for better comparison!
Instead of isolated groups of bubbles, we introduced a heatmap format, making it easier to spot trends across teams at a glance and identify struggling teams without manual comparisons.
VERSION 2
Empowering easy workspace-wide analysis through a heatmap
Apart from our main iterations, we also added
A simple navigation compass at the top to select the workspace, team, and quarter
The Mission Statement to drive home the team’s objective and contextualize their progress
Column labels to distinguish what the numbers in each different column indicate
After iterating, we hopped on another round of calls to gather more feedback.
Issue: The colors were discouraging
Users, especially team members, felt discouraged when seeing red on the dashboard, interpreting it as failure rather than an area for improvement. Leadership also noted that the red/yellow/green system created unnecessary anxiety instead of fostering alignment. Our color choices were impacting team morale and engagement.
Iteration: A softer, more constructive color system!
We replaced the red/yellow/green into a greyscale-to-purple gradient, maintaining the value of the heatmap while reducing negative psychological impact (and fitting in with our brand colors)
The deeper the purple, the greater the succes!
33%
66%
33%
66%
FINAL DESIGN
An intuitive dashboard for seamless team insights
The final dashboard provides a comprehensive view of team performance and alignment across multiple teams in a workspace. Each team has their own row, with key sections displaying critical project data for teams and leadership to view.
It organizes project engagement, goal progress, and historical trends into a single space, making it easier to track alignment and effectiveness over time.
A heatmap-inspired greyscale-to-purple gradient helps surface insights without the negative bias of traditional red/yellow/green indicators. Users can dynamically filter by workspace, team, and quarter, ensuring flexibility in comparison and analysis.
Key Interactions:
Compass Navigation
Effortlessly navigate between different workspaces, teams, and quarters.
Additional Project Insights
Retrieve detailed information about the selected Playbook projects.
Creating New Project
Create new Playbook projects directly from the Dashboard.
LESSONS LEARNED
Designing with users, not just for them.
Working on the dashboard this summer was the most fulfilling part of my role. I led this project from initial research to final implementation, collaborating closely with both the Alignment team and two key customers.
This experience reinforced that the best solutions come from treating users as co-designers rather than just participants. Iterating directly with our customers throughout the process shaped a system that truly worked for them.
Moving forward, I’ll carry this mindset into future projects—prioritizing collaboration, continuous iteration, and designing with users to create impactful, user-driven solutions.