A passion for delivering an amazing, game-changing end-user experience has been both the beginning point and the end outcome for Jemini.
The Jemini journey has been much more than just throwing every trick-in-the-UX-box at the ‘same old, same old’ HR solution. I’ll admit up front that it may have been easier and cheaper to do just that, but it would have only been window dressing, not the HR revolution we had in mind.
I’m not going to talk about features and functions in this blog, but the philosophy of ‘why’. Because that’s way more important.
First, why ‘same old’ just isn’t good enough
Any old HR solution can be refreshed with a new, easy-to-use interface to improve and prettify the user experience. Just add some new tabs, friendlier eforms, a dashboard or two, change the colours, modernise the format – and you’re done.
However, what all the UX in the world doesn’t change is what’s behind the software – how it works and how it engages employees. And a new look doesn’t make traditionally conceived HR software any less boring to use. Most HR software, even the most popular ones, was designed 10 or 15 years ago. They were designed even before an iPhone existed and based on the old-school pragmatic feature, function, ‘solving a business problem’ world.
We developed the Jemini concept from a whole new perspective. Yes, UX is critical to the solution, but what’s more important is the underlying concept of connecting employees to the organisation.
The heart of Jemini
Jemini is an HR experience that reflects the dynamics of how people interact with one another, and the world outside of work. It captures not just what they need to do, but how they feel, and how they want to connect to their fellow employees. Sure, Jemini is business technology, but it’s been created from the inside out – from scratch. We put people in the middle, and the business and the necessary HR processes around them. And made it amazing to use.
When we sat down with a blank page, we agreed we wanted Jemini to be age agnostic. At the heart of the solution had to be giving the user an instant and enjoyable connection; one that would make them go ‘wow, that was easy, and I really enjoyed it.’ And that experience needed to be the same regardless of where users are in their technology life cycle. Whether they are 60 and technology is a somewhat daunting but necessary evil, or 20 with incredible fluency in everything tech.
We wanted to be different, and why not? There’s a lot of room for improvement in the world of HR software.
So, in designing Jemini, the emphasis was never going to be on how quickly users could use the solution (a typical metric). Instead our dream was to make users’ interactions with Jemini so intuitive and interesting that they love the software, its tools, and the business that allows them to use it. That level of comfort automatically makes users more efficient and faster by default, not by force.
The magic of seven
We started with a very clear design philosophy. Every screen, everything that we do in Jemini, is based on the seven plus or minus two theory.
This magic number was proposed by George A. Miller, a cognitive psychologist working at Princeton, as the limit on a human’s capacity for processing information. While his thesis may have been published back in 1956, it remains one of the most highly cited papers in psychology.
In a nutshell, Miller says that as a human you struggle to deal with more than seven issues, demands, reports, actions, at any one time. We agree with him, so we designed Jemini to play to the seven plus or minus two. You may see as few as five things on your screen, or nine at the very most. Even though you may have more than nine things to see they will become cards that you grab and drop.
Saying ‘no’ to boredom
Jemini is an exciting solution. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before, and there’s lots more to tell you.
Without giving you a demonstration, you will just have to take my word for it. Or you could take it from one of our clients who said in an email just last week: “I met with Hamish today to review the progress on Jemini. It is looking awesome - I am just fizzing with delight at the prospect of going live!”
Can you remember the last time you were fizzing with delight about a software implementation?
Enough said.