Case study · Employee experience · Internal innovation sprint · Australian financial advisory firm · 2025

Staff Portal Concept: MyFlow

Staff software people would actually want to open. An internal innovation sprint asked the team to imagine a more humanised staff portal for a professional-services firm. Before anyone else designed anything, I ran the research into the psychology of work myself, and it became the brief the whole sprint worked from: every designer then built their own concept against it. MyFlow is mine, an interface treated as a meaningful partner to employees rather than a tool that tracks their tasks, arguing from evidence about what motivates people instead of a hunch about a nicer task list.

Nothing about the subject was hypothetical. Across more than 100 offices in Australia and New Zealand, staff run the firm’s business process platform through a front-line console called WorkerPortal, each person owning one distinct unit of a process while teams work toward a shared service outcome. That console was what we had been asked to re-imagine. The concept was speculative; the constraints were not, and the question underneath them was live: what should software feel like when it is where someone spends their whole working day?

MyFlow is my own concept. All interfaces below are recreations built for this case study; client names are fictional.

Role

Product Designer
& Researcher

Client

Australian financial advisory firm
Internal innovation sprint

Timeline

2025

Team

Solo concept
against a brief I set for the sprint

At a glance

The problem
The console staff use across more than 100 offices gave them a flat task queue, with no sense of what mattered first or who any of it was for.
What I did
Ran the psychology-of-work research that became the brief the whole sprint designed against, then built my own concept from it, scoping the manager view out because the weekly reflection would have become a surveillance tool.
What it produced
A concept presented at the end of the sprint, with a measurement model for how I would test the hypothesis.

The weekly AI reflection, over the day it is reflecting on. Recreation; fictional names.

The Problem

A worker opens WorkerPortal on an ordinary Monday and meets the same flat list everyone gets: a one-size-fits-all layout with no sense of what to tackle first, and no sense of why it matters. There’s no cohesive, humanised experience, only disconnected interfaces, a task list here, a create-task screen there, that add up to a fragmented day.

Read against the psychology, the gaps line up with the three drivers of motivation. Staff have no sense of ownership over the work: tasks arrive assigned rather than chosen, and no one’s own working style is accounted for. They get no feedback or recognition and little room to grow. And they can’t see how their work contributes to the firm’s goals or its clients, so the work feels meaningless. Interfaces built purely for productivity strip out exactly the things that keep people motivated.

The sprint brief was open: imagine a better staff experience. I wanted to explore a question I’d been circling in my own work on the psychology of motivation.

What would this software look like if it were designed around what actually motivates people, rather than around the tasks we need them to complete?

The stakes are commercial, not just cultural. A professional-services firm’s entire margin is staff time and staff quality, so software that quietly drains motivation is draining the product itself. That is why the research leads this case study.

One scoping decision up front, since the portal has two kinds of user. I designed for the worker as the primary user, the person actually doing the tasks, and treated the manager who needs oversight of team progress as a secondary consideration. A portal built around motivation has to earn the worker’s trust first, and bolting a management dashboard onto that same surface too early is how you quietly turn a motivation tool into a monitoring one. That tension comes back later.

The Approach

The research: intrinsic beats extrinsic

Before any of us designed anything, I set the brief. I ran the research into the psychology of work alone, and it became the direction the whole sprint built against: every designer took it and built their own concept in response, and MyFlow is mine. The throughline of the research was this: extrinsic pressure, deadlines, overdue flags, bonuses, drives short-term action, but for anything beyond the simplest tasks it can actually impede the creative, cognitive effort real work needs. Intrinsic motivation, the kind that comes from the work itself, is what sustains engagement. A few findings did the most to shape what I built:

13%

Workers are 13% more productive when happy (De Neve’s six-month BT study). Wellbeing isn’t soft; it’s output.

56%

of people define productivity as “the feeling of accomplishment”, not raw volume. Perceived progress matters as much as actual.

Zeigarnik effect

The brain fixates on unfinished tasks, and completing one releases dopamine. Small, visible wins compound motivation.

Our team’s user research said the same thing in the workers’ own words. Two interview quotes stuck with me and became the emotional brief for the whole concept:

You have more impact if you’re motivated in your job… we all have the opportunity to have an impact on what we do.

Worker interview, team user research

It’s being able to make a difference, knowing my involvement is adding value and that it’s working with meaning and purpose.

Worker interview, team user research

The organising model came from Dan Pink’s reading of self-determination theory: deep motivation needs three things, and I got a little obsessed with them. I made each a design principle, then mapped it to a concrete feature rather than leaving it as a mood board.

Driver 01

Autonomy

Control over how you work. Micro-management and one-size workflows make people feel like cogs; choice makes the work feel like theirs.

In MyFlow · multiple task views (List, Board, Calendar, Table) so people work in the style that suits them, a private Journal, and self-set Goals rather than assigned ones.

Driver 02

Mastery

A sense of growing competence, fed by rapid feedback. Motivation ebbs when you can’t tell whether you’re doing well, like aiming at an invisible target.

In MyFlow · step-by-step task progress (“Step 1 of 8”), Goals with an at-a-glance status, and a monthly Highlights reel of what you actually finished.

Driver 03

Purpose

The feeling that the work has real impact. It needn’t be grand, supporting a colleague or serving a client well is purpose enough.

In MyFlow · “Today, you’re helping 3 clients”, a per-task Why is this important? that names who it helps, and a Community feed so you see you’re not working alone.

The home screen leads with people, not tasks

The first thing you see isn’t a count of outstanding items. It’s a greeting, who you’re helping today (purpose), your own goals (mastery), and a feed of colleagues working on the same things. The task list itself can be switched between List, Board, Calendar or Table, so people manage work in the style that fits them (autonomy). People organise work differently, and defaulting everyone into a single task view is itself a constraint on how they think.

Home · the day opens on purpose, progress and people. Recreation.

An AI reflection that shows people their impact

The feature I’m most attached to is a weekly pop-up. Once a week, MyFlow uses AI to analyse the tasks you completed and the goals you’ve set, and surface a few genuinely personal insights to reflect on. It answers the question the old task list never could: what did all that work actually add up to? Seeing the benefit you’ve provided, and the broader contribution you’ve made, is what turns completed tasks into a sense of purpose.

Weekly AI accomplishments · reflection, not a productivity score. Recreation.

That same reflection is the feature I trust least, and scoping it mattered as much as designing it. To show someone the impact of their week, it has to read what they completed and the goals they set, and that is exactly the kind of data that becomes uncomfortable the moment someone other than the worker can see it. Designed for the worker, it is a mirror. Handed to a manager, it is surveillance, and the same feature flips from motivating to menacing. I scoped the manager view out of this concept partly to avoid pretending I had solved that, when I had not.

Every task answers “why does this matter?”

Open a task and it doesn’t just list steps. It breaks the work into visible progress (“Step 1 of 8”), and it leads with why the task is important, who it’s for, and the desired outcome, in plain human terms. When a new task lands, I give the worker a small but deliberate choice: start now or do later. It is a tiny UI detail, but it hands back the same autonomy self-determination theory names as a driver of motivation, on the same screen that already carries the competence signal of the step count and the purpose already spelled out in the why.

Task detail · steps become visible progress; the “why” leads. Recreation.

The Outcome

The sprint ended with each designer presenting their concept, and MyFlow was mine. It is a vision piece, so its job is to argue a direction, not ship a feature. But I still owed the room an honest account of how I’d test it. My hypothesis: if people can see their accomplishments and reflect on their goals, they feel a stronger sense of purpose and value, which lifts motivation and, ultimately, the quality of the work they produce. I proposed measuring it like this:

Weekly journal entries completed, and the % of users who review their accomplishments and set a new goal.

Consistency in task-completion rate over time, a proxy for whether the sense of purpose is holding.

Qualitative feedback on motivation and confidence in daily work, straight from the people using it.

What I’d resolve next

A few things are deliberately unfinished, and I said so in the room. The Community space is the clearest example. It’s needed, there’s a lot to learn from how colleagues completed similar tasks, but I hadn’t explored its visual representation deeply enough to call it resolved. I’d also thrown a notification into the flow that needs proper thought rather than the placeholder it currently is.

There’s a real risk to name, too. A motivation-led interface can tip into the artificial. It’s the same overjustification effect self-determination theory warns about, the theory this whole concept is built on: lean too hard on extrinsic motivators and they erode the intrinsic ones you’re actually trying to protect. So the line I kept checking against was whether each element helped people feel genuine ownership and meaning, or performed positivity at them. The Community feed shows solidarity, not a scoreboard, for exactly that reason.

The consent model on the weekly AI reflection is still unresolved, and it is the part I’d want settled before anything else. If I took this further, it would come before the polish: the worker would need to own the summary, choose whether any of it is ever shared upward, and trust that “the impact behind your week” is being written for them and not about them.

Reflection

I’m drawn to this project because it let me put a body of theory I care about, the psychology of motivation, directly against interface decisions. Stacked on top of autonomy, mastery and purpose is Maslow’s self-actualisation, and that’s what MyFlow reaches for: not just a tool that helps people do the work, but one that helps them see the impact of it and move towards their full potential. (The name wasn’t planned. I didn’t mean to rebrand anything, I started calling it MyFlow because it fit, and it stuck.)

The discipline wasn’t inventing features; it was refusing the easy motivational tropes and keeping every element tied to a real driver. If I took it further, the measurement model above is where I’d start, because a concept can argue that “helping a person” beats an overdue flag, but only evidence tells you if it’s true, and for whom.