Case study
Employee Experience Tool
What if employees had a first port of call for their workday—one place where productivity and engagement were two sides of the same, well-designed experience?
The challenge
As a large financial institution with 40,000+ employees across multiple markets, DBS was using innumerable digital tools and information repositories, and found it difficult for their employees to collaborate, connect, and stay engaged via these often sterile, fragmented digital platforms.
With hybrid work here to stay, much of employees’ days are spent in digital spaces. DBS was interested in finding out how they could design a workplace tool to improve employees’ day-to-day experience: enabling employees’ productivity, while enhancing their engagement.
The process
Discover
- Stakeholder interviews
- Employee interviews
Define
- Prioritisation workshops
- Co-creation workshops
- Strategic alignment workshop
Deliver
- Sketches & ideas
- 3-stage MVP roadmap
1 · Discover
As this was the starting point for what was to be a large, multi-year project for the bank, it was important to me that we establish a shared foundation before moving forward. We held extensive conversations with senior sponsors, stakeholders, and product owners to understand their different visions for the tool.
This groundwork proved critical: these conversations surfaced that there were conflicting assumptions about and visions for this tool.
We brought our findings back to the product team and facilitated a working session to bridge the gaps. Our role was to create the conditions for consensus—surfacing conflicts, translating between perspectives, and helping the team commit to a unified direction.
We then performed in-depth interviews with 48 employees—of which I led ~30. Very quickly, broad patterns emerged: while employees may differ in their specific roles, responsibilities, and activities, they shared many commonalities in terms of what they needed in order to stay engaged and productive:
Meaningful Contribution
A sense that they are contributing to the organisation, and that their efforts are being recognised.
Sense of Belonging
Convivial relationships with their team, department, and the organisation as a whole.
Continuous Growth
Opportunities and support to explore new areas of interest and responsibility.
Autonomy
Being enabled with both the requisite tools as well as trust from their peers to execute tasks and decisions.
Personal Well-being
The ability to manage the boundary between work and life, and to be able to find moments of fun and pleasure at work as well.
2 · Define
We ran issue prioritisation workshops to identify the most pressing issues to solve, and which might be addressable via the implementation of a digital solution.
Then we brought together 30+ employees for 2 ideation workshops, inviting them to imagine what their ideal digital work platform might look like.
3 · Deliver
Tight timelines and ever-evolving project stakeholders and configurations required constant adaptability and patience, to be able to work swiftly while ensuring effective collaboration with everyone who became involved in the project at different points in time.
We delivered a 3-stage MVP roadmap, along with the rich research findings, recommendations, ideas, and sketches to the design team.
The upshot
We were humbled to hear from the client that the digital solution that was implemented had been awarded the 2025 Singapore Good Design Mark.
What was even more meaningful for me was to hear that our research was still being applied to inform the client’s broader employee experience initiatives: the insights had legs beyond what we’d originally scoped for.
Experience Design category.