New Case Study: BlackbookHR Reinvents HR Software Using AngularJS and Wijmo

Managing your company’s talent, most commonly referred to as employees, is the top task of many of today’s human resource professionals. Just as technology has infiltrated every other segment of our lives, it is now a large part of successfully attracting and retaining talent. HR professionals have known for years that individuals who are connected with content, activities and resources that appeal to them often perform better at their jobs and report a higher level of satisfaction. While HR professionals are insightful and have organizational development experience, their industry was lacking dedicated and comprehensive business intelligence. Enter into the market, BlackbookHR a startup in the human resources technology space. BlackBookHR set out to revolutionize the market by creating a product known as Sense. Sense allows HR Executives to analyze & monitor their workforce to uncover issues relating to employee engagement and the overall health of the organization. With that concept in mind, and the goal of building a single page web application that could handle large amounts of data, Blackbook’s development team choose AngularJS as their toolset for building the framework for Sense. “AngularJS is known for its extensibility and ability to work with well with other libraries,” said John David Back, technologist at BlackbookHR. “Angular allowed us to load pages with graphics and asynchronously populate reports with tens of thousands of records,” said Back. The next step for BlackbookHR was to define the user interface (UI) for Sense and to create the stunning charts they needed that would perform at the highest standard. BlackbookHR turned to Wijmo’s library of AngularJS components. Wijmo by ComponentOne, is a kit of over 40 UI widgets that seamlessly integrate with AngularJS. Sense is a survey-based approach to workforce analysis and a majority of the reporting dashboards use charts for representation of the data. BlackbookHR was able to integrate Wijmo charting into their web applications using the Wijmo Pie Chart widget (wijpiechart). The pie chart draws each series as a slice of data and includes rich customization and animation. “The Wijmo pie chart widget does an incredible job of animating our data that is loaded asynchronously with AJAX,” said Back. “The charts are live and redraw dynamically. Plus, by displaying the data in this format, analyzing the data is much easier for the end user.”

“We found Wijmo easy to learn with solid support resources. Without Wijmo we would still be working on the application, it saved us several weeks and a couple hundred hours in development time, helping us get to market sooner.” John David Back Technologist at BlackbookHR

In addition to the Wijmo Pie Chart widget, BlackbookHR used the Wijmo Bar Chart widget (wijbarchart) to draw a series as a column of data. Specifically, BlackbookHR used the Wijmo Bar Chart widget to show exactly how a candidate’s score breaks down across the organization and the community. When it comes to gauging overall employee satisfaction, it made sense to BlackbookHR to use the Wijmo RadialGauge widget (wijradialgauge) to deliver the exact graphical representation needed, complete with range indicators, custom colors, fills, fonts and more. Recently Sense was named one of the Top Products for HR in 2013 by Human Resource Executive. “By combining Wijmo with AngularJS we were able achieve our goal of delivering a user-centered design HR application,” said Back. “It is the best of both words when you can merge technical functionally with visual elements. We found Wijmo easy to learn with solid support resources. Without Wijmo we would still be working on the application, it saved us several weeks and a couple hundred hours in development time, helping us get to market sooner.” This Case Study is also available as a PDF.