Major user experience improvements optimizes the platform
One of the greatest joys we have as a team is being able to say that we use the product every week. It’s a reliable part of our workflow and helps us stay aligned and focused on our goals. Simply put, we’re eating our own dog food.
As an effort to understand customer pain points and ways we can improve the experience, every six weeks, we set aside time as a team to host “Project Empathy”. This time is dedicated to getting outside the proverbial forest and an attempt to understand our customer’s point of view. During Project Empathy, we test the product in real-world customer scenarios, which helps us to catch bugs, identify product improvement areas, and optimize the user experience. Having this deeper understanding of how our tools are used helps all of us empathize with what our customers need.
A top priority was to make it easier to navigate Koan. We found that there was repetitive information across different sections and inconsistent interaction patterns. We care about making Koan the easiest platform to manage goals, and we’re excited about the recent navigation improvements just launched. In addition to the new layout you’ll see across Koan, here are some of the recent improvements we've made based on customer feedback, as well as discovered through Project Empathy.
Teams
New Team Navigation: we removed both the public and private team home pages to simplify and unify navigating team content. You’ll find new controls in the header to view team members and observers, plus to access additional team information like the description and related teams.
All Teams: we’ve simplified the All Teams page, which offers a way to see all the teams within the organization, and the associated team members and goals. You can now see more teams in a streamlined view, as well as search for specific teams to access their OKRs faster.
Batch team creation: we rebuilt the team creation form to be faster and easier to use, including the ability to create multiple teams in quick succession.
Reflections
Improved Reflections Experience: as part of the team navigation overhaul, we’ve combined the two sub-tabs under Reflections into a single, cohesive experience where you can easily write your Reflection and read other team members’ Reflections in one simple view.
Real-time Reflections: at Koan, we reserve the first 10 minutes of our team meetings to read and react to one another’s Reflections. It’s a great way to make sure we’re up to speed with one another’s activities and to celebrate the wins before we dive into reviewing goals progress and other strategic topics. Now we’ve made that practice a bit more rewarding for everyone with real-time updates to emoji reactions and comments.
Goal Creation and Management
Streamlined Objective and Key Result Creation: This new experience allows users to add new goals and inline key results directly within their goal list. The new Save and Cancel buttons also make the creation flow clearer.
Updated Datepicker: The updated datepicker lets you select goals to be due at the end of the month or the end of the quarter to save some extra clicks.
Company Homepage
Improved Company HQ: we eliminated the need to manually publish the company homepage. Now everyone in your organization will see your top-level goals, mission, vision, and any relevant links.
User Management
We’ve made a few improvements to help admins manage users across their organization:
Team invitations: Bulk invites let you set up teams (or your whole organization) faster than ever. Plus, you can invite new admins by email.
User editing: Easily edit user profiles for anyone in your organization.
Archive users: When employees leave the organization, you can archive users from the "Manage all Users in Koan" settings page.
Other
Visual Refresh: you’ll notice a different overall look and feel to the platform, as well as other improvements to how you navigate throughout Koan. We hope these adjustments make it easier to use the product and collaborate with your teams.
OKR resources: We have also added a new, simplified sidebar full of support options, as well as contextual help within the Koan app to aid your team with both Koan and the OKR process.
We’re still hard at work, continuing to make Koan the simplest way to help your teams stay aligned and productive. As always, if you want to talk about anything we’ve covered in this post or learn more about our platform, feel free to reach out on Intercom, schedule a meeting, or give us a follow on Twitter or LinkedIn.
