HR Tech with Empathy

Managers are asked to lead through their employees' hardest moments — with no training and no visibility.

Neither side had a system for this; they had improvisation.

Mapped early, to see what we'd miss.

While still working through wireframes, we mapped this flow end-to-end, prioritizing the employee-expert interaction first. It carries the most sensitivity of any exchange in the product.

Sharing something real, without it feeling like a form.

Employees needed two different things here: a way to let the right people know something was going on without over-explaining it, and a way to find support that actually matched their situation — quickly, without guessing which category fit.

Sharing what's happening

Sharing a life event is meant to feel like a safe space, not a task to manage alone. What Villyge takes over is the daunting part — telling the manager, and equipping them with guidance for that specific situation.

Booking an expert

From there, the flow narrows fast: pick a category, get matched to an expert, pick a time. Three steps, no dead ends.

After the session

The thread with an expert stays put, and the same event feeds a content library and the option to keep working with that expert going forward.

Running their own practice, not filling someone else's slots.

Experts needed to feel like they were running their own practice inside the platform, not just filling slots someone else controlled. So they got their own availability, a synced calendar, a full client list, and their own to-do list — the same idea as the manager's checklists, but one they fill in themselves.

Setting availability

Experts set their own hours and sync them against a personal calendar, so Villyge never double-books them.

Switching views

Experts move between month, week, and day without losing context.

Client conversations

Clicking into a client opens their conversation thread alongside a private notes panel — a folder only the coach can see. In usability testing, coaches asked for a way to lock that folder further, so it can optionally be protected with its own password, separate from account login.

Enough to notice. Enough to act.

This is the real design problem in the whole product: a manager needs to know enough to act — send a check-in, adjust a deadline — without ever seeing the private detail an employee disclosed. The dashboard surfaces a nudge and an action; it never surfaces the note itself.

Manager's dashboard

The dashboard reads like a feed: each teammate's moment — a birthday, a new life event, a training reminder — paired with a single next action, like sending a reminder or opening a checklist. It's built to surface what to do, never the private note behind it.

Manager checklist

Clicking "See Checklists" from a dashboard nudge opens a step-by-step guide for that exact life event — staged from the moment a manager finds out through the employee's return.

Guidance

A separate tab holds short guides on every life event a manager might face — pregnancy, adoption, elder care, loss, and more — so a nudge always has somewhere deeper to send them.

Real users, reacting to the flows we shipped.

Before shipping, we ran three moderated usability sessions on the live product. Each participant walked through the same core path: onboarding, sharing a life event, finding and booking a coach, then reviewing their sessions afterward.

Rather than treating each session as a one-off list of feedback, we mapped every session into an empathy map, split into four parts:

• Facts — what the participant actually did or ran into.
• Quotes — what they said, in their own words.
• Emotions — how they felt at each step.
• Conclusions — what we should change as a result.

Splitting it this way let patterns across participants surface quickly — instead of getting lost in three separate sets of notes.

One session, mapped

Lisa's "Finding an expert flow" session surfaced the most actionable insights of the three — several of the conclusions below shipped directly as a result.