Making 1:1 conversations very easy

Clunky 1:1 experience affects the quality of 1:1 conversations.

Since its 2014 launch, OpenBlend has rapidly gained prominence in the UK's performance management and HR space, facilitating over 700,000 1:1 conversations annually by 2023. The 1:1 tool, launched in 2018, was the company's most-used and most critical feature — and the primary reason customers signed up.

But it was struggling to gain traction. Managers and employees weren't using it the way it was designed, causing customer churn and becoming the company's main focus for retention. I was the sole designer on this project from December 2023 to July 2024, working closely with a Product Manager — handling research, design, prototyping, and usability testing end-to-end.

Understanding how 1:1s were actually happening.

At the start, we only had feedback from the customer experience team. I partnered with the Product Manager to go deeper, speaking to 50 customers — Talents, Managers, and Admins — from various companies.

Five clear patterns emerged from those conversations:

• ✦Challenging navigation — The journey from homepage to direct reports to specific items was long and cumbersome.
• ✦Rigid scheduling — Booking a 1:1 was difficult enough that customers held meetings outside OpenBlend entirely.
• ✦No control over topics — Talents and managers couldn't control what they discussed or how often.
• ✦No unified agenda view — Agendas were prepared separately and not shared, so both parties entered meetings blind.
• ✦No way to log conversations — Customers were using notepads (digital or paper) to capture outcomes.

I used Mixpanel to analyse event data on the current experience, measuring drop-off rates at key points. The data confirmed what users were telling us: most users don't add an agenda before starting a 1:1, book fewer regular meetings than expected, cover only about 45% of agenda topics during discussions, and rarely take notes.

Simplifying the preparation and guidance
of a 1:1

Before a single screen was designed, I needed to understand users' pain points and where the business was heading. Four questions shaped the strategy:

• ✦Why is it important that we improve the 1:1 experience?
• ✦What would the best 1:1 experience look like?
• ✦What context do I need to consider in terms of pain points and business objectives?
• ✦What is the dynamic between talent and manager conversations?

With those questions answered, I reframed the problem around three design challenges:

• ✦How might we improve the quality of conversations?
• ✦How might we increase the quantity of conversations?
• ✦How might we make preparation genuinely easy?

From there, three design principles lit the path forward.

Multiple rounds before anything shipped.

To reach the final design, I ran internal tests with company staff and external sessions with customers — managers, talents, and admins. Each round shaped what got refined next.

The most useful signal from testers:

• ✦Smart suggestions were a hit — the ability to add agenda items from AI suggestions, predefined topics, and custom entries felt natural and useful.
• ✦Focus and purpose needed to connect to the suggestions — testers wanted the agenda intent to inform what was recommended.
• ✦Too many clicks to add a single agenda item — this was the clearest friction point and led to a direct simplification.
• ✦The structure of the discussion experience was well received — the new layout was preferred over the old product across the board.

Eight months. One complete redesign.

The new experience launched globally on October 14, 2024 — the most significant change to the product since the company was founded. After eight months of research, iteration, testing, and refinement, it was one of my proudest achievements.

Post-launch, I collaborated with the Marketing and Customer Success teams to build the materials needed to communicate and sell the value of the redesign to customers. The rollout was phased, and the early feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

Some of the messages that came in from colleagues and customers: