Sonar6 - Performance Management Blog

Sonar6 has made a name for itself as one of the most accessible and user friendly performance review systems available - but that didn’t happen by chance. We spend a huge amount of time researching and refining our interface, and with an audience as diverse as ours, that’s something we can’t afford to get wrong.

In this article Catherine Bircher, Sonar6’s Quality Lead, discusses some of the challenges we face when it comes to designing our UI, and what we’re doing to make Sonar6 v3 easy for everyone to use.

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Last month Sonar6 went along to the awards ceremony for the 2008 Design in Business Awards. While we didn’t win, we had a enjoyable evening in some very talented company.

Congratulations to the team from tapware manufacturer Methven for winning this year’s award, and to the Highly Commended AuCom Electronics and phil&teds on their recognition. It was of course an honour to make it to the finals, and we appreciated the opportunity to practice our gracious loser faces!

The design in business awards celebrate companies that have used design to build competitive advantage. In fact their website states: There is growing evidence that companies who strategically use design perform and compete better than their rivals. At Sonar6 we love design! We love evaluating our progress from a user experience standpoint, rather than just measuring the length of our feature list… so we are stoked to be a finalist in the Design in Business Awards.

Traditionally these awards have been dominated by manufacturers - great companies designing bathroom fittings and clothes and furniture and baby buggies - so it is unusual for a software company like Sonar6 to feature, but even more unusually our friends at the very cool online accounting company Xero are also a finalist. Seven finalists in a design awards and two of them are SaaS companies… the world really is changing!

While Sonar6 is already recognised as the most user-friendly performance and talent management system on the market, we decided we could make things
better: even more attractive and even easier to use.

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