Aster

With a vision to enhance workforce well-being and ultimately the success of the organization, Aster set out to become a unique player in the HR tech landscape. The founder, inspired by the potential for an entirely novel approach, aimed to create a platform where users could not only manage their workforce but gain deep insights into the well-being and morale of their teams. Recognizing the crowded HR analytics space—dominated by established solutions like CultureAmp, Glint, and 15Five—Aster took a bold stance: to stand out through an innovative, unconventional interface that presents an organization’s well-being like a living organism viewed through a microscope.

An organism-like view

To achieve a distinctive visual identity, I conceptualized an interface that presents the organization as a dynamic "living tissue," allowing users to explore layers of employee well-being and sentiment by zooming in and out of different organizational levels. This view offers a unique way to interact with the data, where users can navigate up, down, left, right, and even in and out, exploring granular data from a high-level perspective to a detailed group analysis. The interface becomes almost like a microscopic lens into the organization's "health," allowing HR teams to zoom in on specific departments, locations, or teams, seeing how well-being trends evolve at each layer.

Subtle guidance

Taking inspiration from gaming and cinematic design, we applied a "non-diegetic" approach to Aster’s interface—creating elements that serve the user but do not directly interact with the organization’s “organism” view. This means data, analytics overlays, and guidance appear minimally and unobtrusively around the main view, allowing users to stay focused on exploring well-being data while receiving helpful information in the background. In the same way that non-diegetic elements in movies, like character health bars in video games or subtitles in foreign films, aid the viewer without intruding on the story, Aster’s minimal text elements guide and inform users without detracting from the experience. This design choice resulted in a clean, focused interface where users could explore data without distraction.

Sentiment analysis

Aster aimed to go beyond standard engagement metrics by incorporating sentiment analysis based on natural language processing (NLP) technology. Integrating with tools like Google’s natural language API, we analyzed patterns in employee messages and communication data to assess the emotional tone of various groups. This enabled us to map out trends over time, highlighting changes in employee sentiment that could alert HR teams to emerging issues. Users could view this sentiment data along a timeline, tracking shifts in morale and flagging significant changes for closer investigation. Furthermore, users could tag specific events or add notes, providing context to fluctuations in sentiment and helping organizations take proactive steps to improve morale.

This feature, however, raised privacy concerns. Sentiment analysis involves processing potentially sensitive data, so it was essential to clarify to users and their employees how the data would be handled securely and transparently. Aster adhered strictly to data privacy regulations and ensured anonymized analysis whenever possible, aiming to build trust by offering insights without compromising individual privacy.

Integrations

As part of Aster's planned launch, we targeted Microsoft Teams integration to embed Aster seamlessly into organizations' daily communication tools. Through Teams' API, we could access chat metadata to enrich our sentiment analysis and retrieve essential HR data for Aster’s onboarding. By importing employee lists and organizational structures from existing HR systems, Aster made it easy for companies to set up and maintain accurate data representations. Slack integration was also on the roadmap, allowing Aster to support diverse teams across different platforms.

These integrations streamlined onboarding, automating the import of employee lists and department structures, saving HR admins from time-consuming manual entry. This foundation allowed users to start engaging with Aster’s insights without lengthy setup processes, reinforcing our goal of a smooth onboarding experience.

Intuitive discovery

To make the complex interface approachable, we employed a progressive onboarding approach. Rather than overwhelming users with a one-size-fits-all tutorial, Aster guided them only as they encountered new sections. Initial exploration was encouraged, allowing users to navigate the organism-like interface independently before introducing contextual hints and targeted guides. This approach offered a balance between freedom and guidance, ensuring that users could familiarize themselves with Aster’s features at their own pace, fostering a sense of discovery and control.

Structure & scalability

Aster’s structure was designed to accommodate companies of varying sizes and complexities, with features allowing users to create, merge, and reorganize groups based on their unique organizational hierarchies. The platform supports nested layers for large, multi-location companies as well as streamlined setups for smaller teams. Preset organization types are also available, making it easy for new users to get started while retaining the flexibility to adapt to complex configurations. This scalability ensures that Aster remains relevant to organizations of all scales, regardless of their operational complexity.

Accessibility

From the start, we incorporated keyboard navigation to make Aster accessible to users who rely on keyboard controls. However, screen reader support posed challenges due to the visual nature of Aster’s design. Given the heavy reliance on graphical data—such as color-coded sentiment dots and complex trend graphs—the app had inherent limitations for vision-impaired users. While we’re committed to ongoing accessibility improvements, Aster’s current design may limit access to those with specific visual impairments, particularly in interpreting color and visual trends. Future versions aim to address these limitations further, potentially exploring audio-based insights to enhance accessibility.

Key takeaways

Aster represents a bold approach to workforce analytics by blending HR metrics with a unique, organic-inspired interface. Through thoughtful design, privacy considerations, and integration with existing tools, it aims to provide organizations with an immersive view of employee sentiment, encouraging proactive steps to support workplace well-being. With its innovative use of sentiment analysis and non-diegetic design elements, Aster stands apart in a crowded HR tech landscape, embodying both function and form in service of its users.