MyFlow: designing staff software people would want to open.

The problem

The worker portal’s task list, in its current state, is a one-size-fits-all layout that fails to give staff a clear sense of what they need to accomplish, or 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 (autonomy); their individual working styles aren’t accounted for and they get no feedback or recognition and little room to grow (mastery); and they can’t see how their work contributes to the firm’s goals or its clients, so the work feels meaningless (purpose). Interfaces built purely for productivity strip out exactly the things that keep people motivated.

The sprint brief was open: imagine a better staff experience. Most concepts in the room optimised the queue. I wanted to ask a different question, one 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?

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 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). Research on productivity styles is clear that a single task view doesn’t suit everyone.

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

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. I believe 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. The research is explicit that over-used extrinsic motivators erode intrinsic ones, so the line I kept checking against was whether each element helped people feel genuine ownership and meaning, or just performed positivity at them. The Community feed shows solidarity, not a scoreboard, for exactly that reason.

The sharpest unresolved question is about the weekly AI reflection. 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. If I took this further, the consent model 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. I scoped the manager view out of this concept partly to avoid pretending I had solved that, when I had not.