The Poli Experience
How a Dreaded Habit Became a Design Challenge
Do you like filling out your timesheet? Perhaps, not... And neither do we!
In the world of consulting, timesheets are the quiet villains we all love to hate. Yes, they keep projects funded, resources allocated, and teams accountable. But for the individual, they’re a repetitive, emotionless habit. Like brushing your teeth - good for you, good for everyone - but rarely something anyone wakes up excited about.
So when AESARA decided to transition from one timesheet software to another, the question wasn’t how to make people do it. It was: “How do we make people want to?”.
How a Timesheet Got a Soul
The story started with that very necessary internal change. As you can imagine, it was a stressful shift for everyone. The first wave of pressure hit the Business Development & Operations (BDO) team as they worked to smoothly integrate the new system into our daily workflow. And of course, the rest of the company wasn’t far behind, cautiously facing the prospect of learning a new tool and adapting to unfamiliar ways of working.
And despite “Change before Change” being AESARA’s trademark, any kind of change is pressing for the majority of people.
This is where the Design & Experience (iDX) team was involved to help with this rollout. Initially, we were asked to create Zoom backgrounds & some visuals to promote the change. Instead, we took an extra mile and asked ourselves: “What would make people actually want to engage with the process?”.
That question (a classic UX move) led to the birth of Poli: a chubby, cheerful polar bear cub whose name was inspired by the tool’s name. And from the moment Poli appeared, she became a mascot, an emotional glue that made the internal change exciting & not so frightful.
Why Empathy Works (Even in Timesheets)
Nobody likes being told what to do - especially by your colleague, or even worse - your manager at 4:59 PM on a Friday. And now imagine the nudge coming from a polar bear with a winky face and a cup of coffee, the emotional tone changes completely, as does your perception of this situation. That instantly shifts the mood - from pressure to playfulness.
That’s empathy in action. By removing the human face of accountability and replacing it with a playful character, we built a reminder system that felt friendly instead of forceful. Poli isn’t judging anyone - she is right there with us, going through the same mundane steps each of us must go through every week.
This is where our UX expertise helped us broaden our work from functionality & client-focused projects to emotional usability & an internal challenge that was greeted with adoration.
Designing an Identity (and Accidentally, a Culture)
Poli quickly developed a life of her own. She evolved into a reminder system - appearing in memes, emojis and videos on Slack & Instagram posts each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Each AI-generated post carried a different mood: some funny, some guilty, some surprisingly wholehearted.
We soon had different versions of Poli, each reflecting the personality of their iDX team member creator:
My Poli - the adorable cub doing human-like activities.
Emma’s Poli - calm & outdoorsy.
Kenneth’s Poli - full of witty guilt trips.
Angelo’s Poli - strong, grumpy, and brutally honest.
And just like that, the reminder also evolved into a shared creative ritual, a playground for each iDX member.
The Poli Ripple Effect
What started as an internal UX challenge evolved into something larger: a collaboration between teams that rarely intersected. The iDX and BDO teams - two planets that rarely collided - began collaborating regularly.
As an additional perk, this weekly exercise also boosted our team’s AI learning curve. Generating Poli content pushed us to experiment with new tools (MidJourney, ChatGPT, Sora, Spline, Nano Banana) & improved how we craft our prompts. As a delightful outcome, these new skills helped us apply design thinking into client projects more creatively.
Poli also received a huge bonus: her own branding. Her logo appeared on water bottles & T-shirts; her 3D rendering is now living on our Zoom backgrounds & AR spaces. And as a treat, all this work also rewarded our timesheet performers with some Poli merch!
Let's sum it up!
The Poli Experience is proof that UX isn’t limited to external users - it’s equally powerful when applied internally. By treating our colleagues as users and designing with empathy, we turned a practical system update into a delightful shared experience.
Poli reminded us that emotion is the most effective engagement tool - it humanized digital processes in a fully remote environment. And in doing so, she showed that the heart of UX - empathy & usability - belongs not only in digital products, but in every part of how we work together.
