Lucca · HR software · Engagement · 2025
I joined Lucca’s Talent team in April 2025 to work on Engagement, the app companies use to measure and improve employee well-being. In my first weeks, before habits set in, I audited it end to end. Dozens of UX issues traced back to three root causes, and one direction: help HR teams move from measuring engagement to acting on it.
Product designer, sole author of the audit. I explored the app, graded every finding, traced them to root causes, and turned them into three recommendations with sized next steps.
April – May 2025 · shared May 12, 2025
Scope of the audit
01Context
Engagement is one of the four products in Lucca’s Talent suite. Lucca promises it will help companies take the pulse of their teams, act on their well-being, and improve their engagement.
The app covers a lot: surveys, Bloom for peer recognition, a direct line to start a conversation, discussions, action sheets and pillars.
02What I found
I graded every finding on the same four-level scale, so the team could tell urgent fixes from long-term bets at a glance.
Templates exist, but nothing scaffolds the work. People face dense content and do the heavy lifting alone, from creating a survey to tracking progress.
The content is valuable, but few screens suggest a next step. The app measures well and stops there.
The navigation feels like an incomplete puzzle. “Bloom” sits next to “Surveys”, one branded, one descriptive.
Bloom and Surveys carry Lucca’s playful identity. Pillars, Discussions and the Action list feel left behind.
Engagement aims to cover the whole cycle: measure, act, monitor. Today most of the value sits in measuring. Strengthening action and monitoring would make the product’s impact, and its ROI, visible.
The key shift
Instead of reviewing features one by one, I mapped them against the process an HR team actually goes through. The gaps lined up immediately.
The question the audit left us with
How might we help HR teams go from measuring engagement to acting on it?
03Process
A list of issues tells a team what to patch. Root causes tell it what to change. I kept digging until each finding pointed to a cause.
Ten areas, hands on, through the main journey of each of our three personas: Daniel the admin, Marie the manager, and Valentin the employee.
Fix now, fix later, good for now, or opportunity. One scale for everything.
Map the app against Lucca’s own promise, stage by stage, then check it against UX heuristics.
Group symptoms into root causes, then rate each next step by impact and effort.
Beyond the app itself, I went through the Engagement feedback in Productboard and joined a client onboarding call. Everything came together in one Notion doc, with an annotated Figma board of screens, written to be shared with the team.
The menu mixed three kinds of things: branded features, functional objects and content categories. With no single logic, people couldn’t build a mental model or guess where the next step lived.
Create this survey in several languages?
Translate into
Write the survey in
Fallback language for everyone else
Measure your teams’ real workload, to prevent burnout and adjust resources.
Build your own list of questions.
Start from scratchBefore: a blank title and language settings come first. People have to know what to measure before the app helps them.
The content was rich, but it expected HR teams to translate their real concern (turnover, burnout, retention) into the app’s vocabulary on their own. That takes motivation and ability many teams don’t have to spare.
The promise is to measure and act. Results didn’t lead to actions, pillars didn’t show progress, and nothing compared one survey to the next. So the product couldn’t show its own impact.
04Recommendations
An audit is only useful if the team can act on it on Monday. Every recommendation came with concrete next steps, rated by impact and effort, so quick wins stood out.
Organize the app around how people move from awareness to action, and align the vocabulary with it. Answers the menu puzzle.
Contextual onboarding, tailored prompts and role-based recommendations, so the right thing shows up at the right time. Answers the guidance gap.
Add next steps where they matter most: empty states, survey results, the action list and pillars. Answers the hidden value.
Looking further
Beyond the fixes, the audit opened a few directions for the product’s vision. I flagged them as opportunities, not commitments.
Survey themes could link engagement results to the Lucca products that act on them. Pillars could then frame goals and track progress.
Show HR teams where they stand, so they feel progress, and want the next step.
Templates, best practices and expert advice shared across companies, plus benchmarks as social proof.
Answer surveys in Slack or Teams, by QR code away from a desk, on mobile first.
In parallel, I logged a series of quick wins, often simple UX issues or content that hadn’t been kept up to date. I turned them into a backlog the team could pick from, especially during cool-down periods.
I’d love to hear about what you’re building, especially if it’s in Montréal.