Viva Goals ensures employees understand strategies, manage OKRs effectively, and focus on priorities. It defines clear objectives, aligns them with roles, and provides resources. It sets measurable OKRs, tracks progress, and fosters transparency. By enabling effective prioritization, task delegation, and a balance between short- and long-term goals, Viva Goals drives clarity, alignment, and performance.
To comply with my NDA, I have removed and obscured confidential information, and this case study reflects only my views, not those of Microsoft.
A key obstacle to the widespread adoption of Viva Goals within organizations and teams is its reliance on the OKR framework. The OKR methodology is often perceived as complex and unfamiliar, making it difficult for organizations to implement effectively. Despite attempts to train team managers in OKR adoption, the success rate has been subpar. Moreover, some customers have begun requesting features that allow for the customization of OKR terminology to more straightforward goal-setting language.
Heavy drop-offs at every stage post login. Go with Goals aims to fix drop-offs during the user journey post first login. This includes users who have logged in but not joined an org/team.
Customers/prospects unfamiliar with the OKR methodology cannot choose Viva Goals as a goal management solution: Enterprise companies tend to have multiple autonomous teams working with their own goal setting and reporting frameworks and rhythms. These are largely driven by individual leaders and their leadership styles. Multiple prospects like Carrier and Dolby have dropped out of early pilots due to the tool leaning on the OKR framework for its core workflows.
Users find it challenging to frame goals in a focused and quantifiable manner due to the absence of structured guidance or templates.
Users struggle with mapping their team's goals in relation to organizational priorities. This leads to concerns about duplicated efforts, misaligned initiatives, and difficulty understanding how each team's work contributes to the company's overarching goals.
Current tracking methods, such as bloated Excel documents, are cumbersome and ineffective for tracking updates, understanding historical progress, and analyzing team performance.
Users are frustrated that there's no easy way to share visibility into their team's activities and goals with other teams. The decentralized approach increases the risk of using outdated or incorrect versions of key documents.
Users discover that the tool uses an OKR framework, but they lack prior experience with OKRs. Despite organizational adoption, this creates a barrier to entry as users have to invest time and energy to learn a new framework for goal setting.
The process of creating goals can be overwhelming due to the complexity of the forms and the multitude of steps required. This is exacerbated by the lack of guidance on how to frame specific and measurable goals.
Users find it difficult to track updates, measure team performance, and maintain visibility across teams, often resorting to cumbersome Excel sheets or other inadequate solutions.
Users face difficulties in communicating and collaborating on goals within the tool itself, leading them to use additional software or platforms for discussions, thereby complicating the goal management process.
Even after some interaction with the tool, users like Ross consider dropping off as they find the tool inefficient and ineffective for managing team goals. However, due to organizational commitments or mandates, they might continue to use it reluctantly, adding to their frustrations.
Some of the interesting insights to validate our theory, which led to the decision points ensuring the need to focus more on solving the referencing problem and building the product.
We wanted to redesign Viva Goals to ensure that it should be perceived as robust goal setting and tracking tool. This should be widely used in all the levels of the org. Go with Goals is all about demonstrating value to the broadest swath of users who has the intent to manage their goals in a structured manner"
"Ross (Team Manager) has been tracking her team's "Goals" using Excel but it's becoming chaotic. With separate sheets for each goal and metrics, weekly/monthly updates are frustrating and clarity is lost due to its size. Compiling a summary for presentations to update her higher management is also challenging. Ross team members are finding the bloated Excel document unmanageable. Consequently, Ross seeks a a platform that simplifies goal creation, encourages easy updates, enables goal sharing with other teams, and provides efficient ways in planning and conducting reviews."
There are 3 phases of the goal setting mechanism
Planning, Execution and Retrospection
We saw a dip in the execution phase, this is mainly because of the lack of robust ways to tweak the data in the way that the user want to articulate.
Before diving into designs, it's important for me to understand the types of goals that organizations and individuals would prefer. This gave me a couple of insights into how goals are set and the principles followed by various organizations. The data I collected from different organizations was helpful in identifying signals that worked well.
In just 6 years since 2017, Ally transformed from a basic OKR platform to the leader of the Market. By the end of October 2021, Ally had served over 1,000 enterprise customers in more than 80 countries. The OKR app - designed in 2017
Consumption is one of the five core pillars of Viva Goals, responsible for shaping the experience of how data is articulated, viewed, and understood.
Reimagined Information Architecture, users can now navigate effortlessly, finding exactly what they need without friction. Designed with clarity and efficiency in mind, the new structure ensures that every action—whether setting goals, monitoring progress, or generating reports—is intuitive and seamless. The system works intelligently, surfacing the most relevant insights and enabling users to make informed decisions with confidence.
We have documented all the key scenarios and challenges users encounter throughout their OKR/Goal journey, providing a comprehensive understanding of their experiences, obstacles, and the strategies required for successful goal achievement.
In designing this solution, I adhered to guiding principles that align seamlessly with the Microsoft ecosystem while ensuring a cohesive and intuitive experience within the Viva Suite. My approach prioritized consistency, usability, and integration, creating a solution that enhances productivity and collaboration while maintaining Microsoft's best practices and design philosophy.
A layout grid ensures alignment, consistency, and balance in design, while spacing enhances readability and visual hierarchy, creating a structured, user-friendly interface with optimal white space for clarity and aesthetics. Following the org guidelines, we have incorporated the following definintion.
These users represent Leaders, Senior manager & Manager.
We have identified 4 parts in the page that should go hand in hand to represent Leaders, Senior manager & Manager persona.
- View Tab
- Repackaging components
- Consumption operands
- Table
The result displayed here is the reflection of the top pick by the users of the available options.
Option C is the clear winner, most of our users were looking for a modern yet sleek UI that can resonate well with the other Microsoft 365 products and give you a suite experience to reach the podium.
We deduced the spectrum of the table, this gave us a picture of everything that could potentially be considered while designing.
We defined the functionality of operands, this should comply the cell level interaction and be able to carryout the functionality at column/row level
This view focuses on the details of a Goal, we want to piece all the essentials for a goal to give a rich information. These are the sections we wanted to incorporate and give a panel to each of them so that it can act modular
- Basic Details
- Progress
- Subgoals
- Related work
The result displayed here is the reflection of the top pick by the users of the available options.
Option C is the clear winner, most of our users were looking for a modern yet sleek UI that can resonate well with the other Microsoft 365 products and give you a suite experience to reach the podium.
We dived into detailing the progress panel, as i spoke to the customers there were top 3 pressing problems that needs to be addressed.
- How often do users care about the historical progress?
- What do the customers want to convey?
- Do managers look at the realtime progress time in and out
we figured out 3 main component which should be interactive enough to get the nuances of the progress and also cater to the needs of viewing and authoring experience
We broke the main components into pieces to get a complete picture that completes the used case narrative.
There wasn’t too much to think about the detail section, it was straight forward to pick the existing component from the library and accommodate in the page. We narrowed down the important attributes and stack ranked to see which one goes inside the fold.
We have separated the primary and secondary, where the secondary details will be on demand.
This section needs a bit of an attention and should be considered as similar as the goals list page. There isn’t any strip down version, hence we planned to do reciprocate the same goal.
This section is a simple section of list items. The list comprises of everything that a users can connect to the goal, it can be Documents, Goals, Sheets, Presentation or a custom link
Dive in and play around
Prototype linkDisclaimer:
While specific metrics cannot be disclosed due to confidentiality, the impact and methodology remain representative of my work