Lattice’s New Navigation

The team at Lattice is very excited today to roll out a major product update.

This is different than many of the other product launches we’ve done at Lattice. Instead of adding a new feature, we’ve reorganized our existing features in a way we think will create a much better experience for our users.

30 seconds of history

Before explaining the change, I wanted to provide a little context on how the product came to be structured the way it did.

When we first launched Lattice in May 2016, all we offered was goal management. A month later, we released check-ins, which allowed employees and managers to have a weekly sync. In October, we released performance reviews, which has become our most widely used product. And finally in March of 2017, we released our last performance management module, real-time feedback.

Each of these developments has made Lattice more useful to our customers and been important to our company’s growth.

But from a product development perspective, you can imagine what happened each time we added one of these new modules.

‍

Adding a tab each time we introduced a new module worked fine. It’s a common way for product suites to expand, and overall Lattice stayed usable.

But one day someone at Lattice asked, “Why does our product have to be organized this way? Is it because we think this is the most valuable layout for our customers, or did we get here by happenstance?”

Happenstance was the answer, and that simple fact inspired the team to explore the best way to organize Lattice as though we were building it from scratch.

So this past month we decided to take a little pause from shipping brand new features and instead we reworked the organization of our product. We’re very excited to share the result.

Lattice’s new navigation

After lots of user conversations, design exploration, and thought, we arrived at the conclusion that Lattice’s product should be all about people.

Fundamentally, this new release changes the product’s orientation from being module-centric to being employee-centric.

Now, rather than navigating around the various modules, you’ll be able to see all your information — feedback, check-ins, reviews, and goals — on a single consolidated profile page, as well as top actions that require your attention.

‍

The other main advantage of the new layout is it lets us lean further into a core value proposition of Lattice: that the product is simple for end users but powerful for administrators.The new navigation lets us further separate those two experiences so we can do both at once, without compromise.

We’ve been using the new navigation internally at Lattice and loving it, and think our customers will enjoy it too.

Product velocity is a core tenant of the way we do business at Lattice. But we’ve enjoyed this pause in shipping new features to focus on making our existing experience more refined and user friendly.

As always, we love hearing any and all feedback, so let us know what you think!