Client: Tiffany & Co. Re-Think Feedback in Corporate and Retail Environment
Client: Tiffany & Co. - Corporate & Retail Environment
“Collaboration” Class at Maryland Institute College of Art
Collaboration in a Constant People-Facing Environment
One important aspect of effective collaboration is resolving silos and encouraging productivity. In this case, I applied design thinking to exam collaboration in a specific working environment to identify opportunities for improvement. The client I selected was one of my previous employers: Tiffany & Co., and the opportunity that I targeted was ‘feedback.’ Successful collaboration required effective communication, and delivering feedback unsuccessfully could bring problems to our daily collaborations. Having worked at Tiffany & Co. for quite some time, I realized the current feedback style might not work best for its unique corporate structure. Such experience inspired me to design a service/ system that would enhance the feedback giving and receiving process.
The above categories were the most common ways of giving and receiving feedback — ranked from top to bottom, based on the frequency of usage. All of these feedback styles were serving privacy, but none of them were hitting the perfect score. To dive deeper:
It was the worst to give and receive negative feedback! However, my intention was never to get involved with the content of the feedback. Taking a step back at the chart, we could see that giving feedback in person was only missing ‘recovery’ — it could be emotionally difficult to handle negative feedback in person. On the other hand, written feedback was used frequently enough, and it provided ample opportunity for ‘recovery.’
What if we combine these two types of feedback?
Before jumping to a solution, I interviewed some employees at Tiffany and tested my hypothesis. After analyzing their answers, I came up with these three personas. Each employee represented a different issue, and they also processed feedback on different levels. Lynn, for example, was the youngest, the newest to the company, but had the hardest time both taking and giving feedback.
Here are some of the challenges that current Tiffany employees want to overcome. For example, scheduling an in-person feedback session could be challenging — sometimes email invites got buried under other important things. Here I proposed my design objectives:
Making one official feedback form
Including written component
Inserting ground rules
A scheduling system that would work with existing communication technology
With this simple solution, scheduling feedback meetings could be easier! I’ve received all positive feedback from the rounds of prototype testing. Due to limitations, I was not able to access the Tiffany’s internal communication tool to present a high fidelity prototype. However, the concept of my design could be easily adapted to different settings.