UX Design / UI Design / Visual Design / Art

Peepsplan. A web app that addresses the employee engagement issue

Kalle Lindvall was once an HR specialist assigned to resolve the employee engagement issue in his company. While working on the task, Kalle realized that’s an issue a lot of companies experience, and there’s an opportunity for the web tool to deal with it. Three years later, along with a team of co-founders, he launched the B2B engagement platform called Peepsplan.

When our web development services company talked with Peepsplan founders for the first time back in summer 2019, they already had basic wireframes of the tool. In addition to a detailed elaboration of requirements, especially for UI and UX, they also needed prototyping and implementation in code.

Duration

1,5+ years

Team

Project Manager

Tech Lead

1 Back End Developer

3 Front End Developers

2 UX/UI experts

QA Engineer

– 02 –

Aware of our last experience in web development, Peepsplan founders asked us to assist in designing and building their app.

Solution

The first version of Peepsplan was done in less than 7 months. Then, two more iterations were requested for bug fixing and minor feature updates.

Scope of work

We redesigned and reworked Peepsplan almost from the ground up, introduced new and consistent UX mechanics, made sure all the new features work, and the usability is top-notch through rigorous quality assurance.

Solution

A full-fledged banking online system with extra data security and encompassing compatibility with the most popular mobile and desktop web browsers.

Scope of work

In addition to the features that were necessary to implement, the project also included performance requirements explained below.

Team

2 .NET developers

Web Tech Lead

UI/UX Designer

QA Engineer

Project Manager

duration

Development: 6 months
Support and maintenance: 6 months

The Story

An example of a user journey

Take a look at a user journey in the "Team" and "Culture" sections of the app.

– 04 –

The Product

Peepsplan’s goal is to help managers, HR, and company owners manage their team and improve their motivation and performance.

As a former HR manager, I have seen how a company's culture and vision paper end up in a drawer so many times. We want to make it easier for companies to actually live as they teach.
Kalle Lindvall, Co-founder at Peepsplan

To help with that, the solution consists of several functional modules: Meetings, Culture, Goals, Team, Career, Updates, Insights, and the Admin module.

Here’s a list of Peepsplan major features our custom web development company implemented:

1

Both employees and managers can set up goals and track their status based on the employees’ regular update reports. A goal may be company-wide, group-wide, or an individual one.

2

The performance of every employee can be quickly evaluated through its profile that reveals how many goals 1) have been already met; 2) are on track; 3) have fallen behind.

3

The employees get additionally engaged in their work thanks to the Badges. Based on the company’s culture and values, the Badges serve as rewards for outstanding performance or other achievements. The Badges show in an employee’s profile.

4

Peepsplan helps organize one-on-one meetings, such as performance reviews. A dedicated meeting page stores the meeting agenda, private and shared notes, and a list of current goals/topics for discussion.

5

Managers benefit from detailed real-time organizational stats. The easy-to-use data simplifies and accelerates employee performance analysis and contributes to the optimization of HR management.

In addition to that, Peepsplan helps with creating new employee profiles and setting up onboarding.

– 05 –

Version History

We released two versions throughout the project.

The scope of work for version 1 included:

1. Infrastructure setup

2. Design: wireframes, color scheme, style guide, email templates, and design mockups

3. Authentication processes

4. Home screen

5. Culture, Goals, Meetings, Check-In, and Career modules

6. Team dashboard and Stats available for admins only

7. Personal and Company settings

8. Service menu in the sidebar

9. Deployment to production

The second version contained mostly minor bug fixes and improvements. The team behind our web application company also added a support chatbot.

Later, we also helped Peepsplan with the marketing website for the tool.

The original idea empowered by our implementation resulted in a state-of-the-art solution for company management. Looking at how much the owners care about the development and performance of Peepsplan, I’m seriously considering switching to it as well.
Eugene Polyanskiy, CEO at EGO
– 06 –

Challenges

Stats

Peepsplan collects and organizes a lot of data useful for HRs and managers. However, different roles imply different accesses. And there is data about individuals, groups, departments, and the company as a whole. Designing a system that would present only necessary data to different employees within HR in a clear yet insightful way was quite a challenge.

Architecture

Based on EGO architects’ research findings, it was decided to go for microservices architecture. The team decided to take full advantage of this approach and taught the system to automatically balance the microservices involved depending on the loading levels. In other words, we’ve made Peepsplan ready for scaling and growth from day one.

Lean approach

Just like with any startup, no matter how well you plan your MVP, any feature is always subject to change. With Peepsplan, it happened quite often. Feature sets rely on user feedback and vary significantly between product versions. However, the user-centric development lean approach utilized by the EGO team allowed our web development company to satisfy the needs of all stakeholders and cut development time.

What we’ve been able to do is to compare success rates before using our app and after. And we have seen that 90%+ actually passed the test with our app.
Tim Waldenback for CW39 Houston on Nov 12, 2020
– 07 –

Current status

Stats

In 2020, the owners started the marketing effort on Peepsplan, targeting their homeland market, Sweden, first. As of today, their most prominent clients are local businesses, such as Sweden Algae Factory and Avanoa.

Starting March 2021, EGO web development firm is doing continuous work on the product, implementing a growing list of features from the Peepsplan clients.

The response has been fantastic and we realize that the system solves difficult daily issues many companies face, especially now that many people work remotely and do not see each other daily.
Anders Jansson, CEO at Peepsplan
What we’ve been able to do is to compare success rates before using our app and after. And we have seen that 90%+ actually passed the test with our app.
Tim Waldenback for CW39 Houston on Nov 12, 2020

Tech stack and tools:

Back end

C#, .NET Core 3

CQRS pattern

Libraries used: Identity Server 4.0, SignalR

DB: PostgreSQL, Dapper, EntityFramework migration

Redis for distributed cache, backplane for SignalR

Consul, Ocelot, Graylog

Gitlab CI

Containerization: Docker, AWS ECS

Front end

TypeScript, React

Redux and Redux thunk

Styled components for UI

React DnD

SignalR

React router

Backend

Language

PHP

JavaScript

Python

Terraform

Framework

Slim (PHP)

ExpressJS (JavaScript)

Django (Python)

Libraries

Stripe

Google SDK

Django Rest Framework

Facebook SDK

Firebase

Propel

Unit tests

Django tests

Coverage

Services

Google Cloud + Kubernetes

Sentry

Graylog

Technologies

RabbitMQ

Docker

Databases

Redis

MySQL (Read + write replicas)

Frontend

Language

JavaScript

Framework

ReactJS + TypeScript

NextJS

Libraries

Redux

WebPack

i18n

Sentry

Stripe

Unit tests

Jest

Mobile

Language

Typescript

Dart

Framework

React Native

Flutter

Libraries

Mobx

Redux

Error monitoring

Sentry

Sentry

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