Designing Employee Engagement
through Human-Centered Gamification.
Overview
At Manhattan Associates, I led a transformative research and design initiative aimed at addressing pervasive challenges in employee engagement and retention within warehouse environments.
Labor is one of the most significant operational costs across warehouses, call centers, and retail environments. Of the approximately 9 million workers in these sectors, 3.5 million are employed in warehouse operations alone. Our initiative emerged in response to growing concerns from our labor management team regarding a noticeable decline in employee satisfaction among workers performing repetitive tasks in these high-volume settings.
Anchored in Self-Determination Theory, our goal was to develop a product experience that addressed fundamental human needs: recognition, feedback, autonomy, and personal growth. Our hypothesis was that by humanizing the work experience, we could simultaneously improve employee satisfaction and drive operational efficiency—creating a mutually beneficial outcome for both employees and employers.
My role: I led the end-to-end product design process working closely with 1 additional designer, UX director, PM, and 2 BAs. Time Spent – Approximately 6 months
As the design lead my primary responsibilities were:
Facilitating a five-day cross-functional design sprint, aligning stakeholders and defining the product’s value proposition and market fit.
Independently leading user research from discovery through execution—planning, conducting, and synthesizing findings from interviews, surveys, and usability studies.
Synthesizing qualitative and quantitative insights to inform requirements definition, content strategy, wireframes, and interaction models.
Establishing the visual direction for the product, which was later scaled across multiple solutions, contributing to the evolution of our design system.
Presenting insights and strategic recommendations to product, design, and development teams, ensuring alignment with customer needs and product objectives.
Step 1. The Approach - Design Sprint
Recognizing the complexity and urgency of the problem, we initiated a five-day design sprint to rapidly align on a vision and test high-impact concepts. Our objective was to explore how warehouse employees could become ambassadors of their own work—empowered, motivated, and engaged contributors to their workplace culture.
To frame the challenge, we revisited the core psychological drivers—autonomy, mastery, and connectedness—and aligned them with organizational goals. The sprint brought together diverse stakeholders across product, design, and business, fostering collaborative problem-solving.
Assumptions we wanted to validate
We grounded our sprint in the premise that human motivation is fueled by three intrinsic needs:
Autonomy – The desire to have control over one’s work and decisions
Mastery – The drive to improve and feel competent
Connectedness – The need to belong and contribute to a greater purpose
If we could help employees experience purpose, achievement, and recognition, we believed we could reshape warehouse culture into one that values and uplifts every individual.
Questions we wanted to address
The sprint aimed to answer high-level strategic questions such as:
Why is this project essential, and what long-term impact do we envision—six months, a year, or five years down the line?
How might we increase productivity in warehouse settings in a sustainable and human-centered way?
In what ways can social influence and relatedness enhance performance and morale?
How can employees be made to feel valued, responsible, and recognized for their contributions?
What might a more progressive, empathetic approach to performance discipline look like?
These questions laid the foundation for the solutions we would later prototype and test.
Setting a long term design challenge
We believe we can increase employee engagement by giving supervisors and employees easy access to actionable information, data, and metrics that help them recognize their importance in the success of the organization.
Step 2. Asking the experts
To build a grounded understanding of the current state, we conducted expert interviews with internal stakeholders, warehouse supervisors, and HR leads. These sessions helped us gather contextual knowledge around existing processes, past initiatives, and key pain points that shaped employee experiences on the ground.
We focused on uncovering the nuances behind employee behavior, onboarding patterns, and organizational challenges that were often overlooked in metrics alone.
Employee Demographics and Key Observations:
Digital literacy was limited – most employees were not tech-savvy and primarily relied on paper-based processes.
Education level – majority were high school graduates.
Average age – 44 years, with younger temp workers averaging in their early 20s.
Career trajectory – long-term employees often remained in warehouse roles for decades.
Gender distribution – 15–20% female workforce, often excelling in detail-oriented roles like quality control and picking.
Compensation range – between $13–$25/hour, depending on seniority and function.
Understanding the structure
Training Process Differences
Full-Time Hires:
6-month probationary period.
6–8 weeks of training:
2 weeks with a trainer
2+ weeks of “shadowing” jobs without being held accountable
Then gradual transition to meeting performance benchmarks.
Temp Workers:
2-week training program:
1 week with a trainer
1 week of self-training to start matching standard expectations
These findings highlighted the inconsistencies in onboarding and support, especially for temp workers who often transitioned into full-time roles with minimal feedback loops.
Step 3. Defining the problem
Through our research, we identified both systemic and emotional challenges impacting employee engagement and operational efficiency.
Recruitment and Retention Pressures
According to Gallup, only 30% of U.S. employees feel engaged at work. Globally, that number drops even further.
The rise of e-commerce and a tight labor market have exacerbated labor shortages.
50% of warehouse job postings attract fewer than five applicants.
58.6% of applicants have no prior warehouse experience.
38% of applicants have criminal records, complicating hiring policies.
Evolving Workforce Motivations
Research from 2019 shows that 79% of workers aged 18–29 prioritize job satisfaction over compensation. Traditional incentives like pay are no longer sufficient—employees seek meaning, recognition, and personal growth.
Pain Points Identified:
Lack of real-time feedback systems prevents timely coaching.
High turnover driven by job-hopping and lack of incentive alignment.
Absence of community recognition or shared wins.
Inconsistent disciplinary policies, lacking constructive feedback loops.
Perceived favoritism by leads and supervisors, leading to disengagement and low morale.
Step 4. Framing opportunities
To reframe the challenges into solution-oriented thinking, we facilitated a ‘How Might We’ (HMW) ideation session—transforming insights into actionable opportunity statements.
Expose performance data in a transparent, accessible way for employees?
...Deliver timely feedback that supports continuous learning and improvement?
...Enable real-time coaching moments for supervisors?
...Recognize and reward top performers meaningfully?
...Categorize tasks to create variety and reduce the monotony of repetitive labor?
...Surface complaints and improvement suggestions from employees?
...Foster a more inclusive and positive work culture?
Step 5. Mapping current and future journey
We then mapped the existing user journey, capturing the employee lifecycle from onboarding to daily task execution. This journey highlighted critical drop-off points, gaps in feedback mechanisms, and moments of friction.
Understanding the current landscape - Tracking users journey’s across different customers
Next, we crafted a future-state journey that outlined an ideal experience where employees felt supported, informed, and celebrated for their efforts. The journey accounted for how employees, supervisors, and managers would interact with new product features, including data visibility, coaching prompts, and gamified rewards.
By aligning each “How Might We” question to a stage in the journey, we were able to prioritize opportunities for impact and bring clarity to the product roadmap.
Step 6. Finding Inspirations
To ensure our design ideas were grounded in proven strategies, we conducted a competitive and comparative analysis of tools and platforms tackling similar engagement challenges in adjacent industries.
We examined how companies in retail, logistics, and corporate training use:
Gamification to drive engagement
Performance dashboards to create transparency
Microlearning modules to support skill-building
Recognition platforms to cultivate a sense of belonging
These insights didn’t just inform our feature set—they validated our direction and ensured that our proposed concepts were both innovative and relevant to the workforce we aimed to support.
Step 7. Constructing Concepts
We translated research findings and design opportunities into tangible concepts that showcased full end-to-end experience flows. Each team member contributed a unique perspective by sketching or wireframing possible solutions.
After presenting all concepts, we conducted a dot-voting session to surface the most compelling ideas. We then synthesized the best features across concepts into a hybrid prototype that reflected the strongest solutions from multiple perspectives.
As the ideas came together, a clear theme emerged: gamification. We observed repeated elements such as point systems, leaderboards, progress bars, and achievement badges—each reinforcing performance, recognition, and motivation in a non-intrusive way.
Step 8. Storyboarding
To create alignment across stakeholders and development teams, we built a detailed storyboard that illustrated a day-in-the-life scenario for a warehouse employee using our envisioned product.
This visual narrative helped contextualize feature sets, clarify touchpoints, and humanize the solution by placing it in a realistic workflow. The storyboard was instrumental in helping non-design stakeholders understand the emotional and practical value of our approach.
Step 9. Sprint Prototype
With a well-structured concept and validated assumptions, we moved into prototyping. Drawing from principles outlined by the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, we emphasized elements of gamification that encourage: Collaboration | Problem-solving | Communication | Exploration of identity
These qualities not only align with evolving workforce expectations but also position the product as a catalyst for behavioral change in the warehouse environment.
The prototype was designed to be clear, actionable, and rewarding. Features included:
A personal dashboard with performance metrics
A points and rewards system
A task challenge center
Real-time feedback and coaching modules
Takeaways
From this sprint, several critical design principles emerged:
Build a gamified recognition system that visibly rewards effort and performance.
Keep the system intuitive and easy to navigate—especially for a non-tech-savvy audience.
Allow employees to control the outcome—with simple, transparent mechanics behind point accumulation.
Provide frequent and meaningful incentives to sustain engagement.
The solution must embed motivation within the flow of work, not add friction to it.
These takeaways helped shape the product vision and gave us a Prototype with clear mandate for user testing.
Step 10. User Testing and feedback
To validate our prototype and measure real-world usability, we conducted on-site usability testing at the warehouse facility of AmerisourceBergen Corporation, a major pharmaceutical wholesaler. Our testing cohort included 11 warehouse employees, representative of the broader demographic we had designed for.
The prototype focused on a few core features: a performance dashboard, task-based challenges, a rewards system, and real-time feedback capabilities.
91% of participants reported that the system was easy to use and allowed them to complete tasks with minimal guidance.
82% stated that the purpose of the application and its features were immediately understandable, suggesting high alignment between design intent and user expectations.
What Worked (Successes):
90% of users found the concept of a personalized dashboard highly appealing, particularly its ability to visualize performance metrics and track personal progress.
100% of participants emphasized the value of real-time visibility into their performance data, stating that this transparency would help them improve and feel more in control of their outcomes.
What Didn’t Work (Failures):
44% of users felt overwhelmed by the volume of information presented, particularly on the main dashboard. This indicated a need for better information hierarchy and content prioritization.
28% misunderstood the “challenges” feature, assuming it was optional or unrelated to their tasks. This pointed to a language and labeling issue within the interface.
The leaderboard feature was polarizing. While top performers embraced the competitive element, others felt it introduced pressure or could create division. This insight led us to explore alternative motivation frameworks beyond competition.
We also asked participants where they would prefer to access the app and which features they found most valuable. Most indicated a strong preference for mobile or shared tablet devices located within workstations. The performance dashboard and training & mentoring were consistently ranked as the most useful, with the leaderboard appealing to a younger demographic.
The Learnings
This project was a powerful demonstration of how human-centered design can address systemic workplace challenges. By putting the emotional and motivational needs of employees at the center of our process, we created a solution that bridged the gap between business goals and employee well-being.
Start with human needs, not metrics: Centering empathy in our design process allowed us to solve for long-term engagement rather than short-term compliance.
Design thinking is scalable: Our process created a repeatable framework for tackling similar challenges across other labor-focused industries.
High-fidelity visuals aren’t always necessary: Communicating the concept and value of the product is more important than pixel perfection in early-stage prototypes.
Collaborative design builds momentum: Working closely with fellow designers fostered trust and accelerated decision-making, leading to faster cycles and stronger buy-in from leadership.
Adopt an MVP mindset: Staying focused on a minimum viable product helped the team stay aligned on priorities and deliver real value in a tight timeframe.
Ultimately, this initiative reinforced the role of UX as a strategic partner in organizational change—not just a discipline focused on interface design. The project helped us prove that even in traditionally underserved environments like warehouses, thoughtful, inclusive design can unlock motivation, pride, and performance.