Timesheet for Workforce Management

The goal

From scattered spreadsheets to one platform, for 1,000+ employees

People were working from home all over the world during the pandemic. The client company (insurance domain) took the same approach at work and wanted a productivity measure for their employees. Originally, the company relied on traditional methods — Excel sheets and Word documents — to track the effort each employee completed. As a design solution, we created a platform to manage the productivity of all 1,000+ employees across the company.

My role and ownership

A double-diamond process, worked hands-on with the team at every stage

We used the double diamond for the design process, iteratively. I had multiple sessions with stakeholders to get a clear picture of the problem and real scenarios, and worked with the internal team — business analysts, developers, and the tech lead — at every stage of the project.

Research

Two personas, from twelve-plus conversations

I conducted user interviews and customer interviews with 12+ users to understand the user’s way of working, including both team leads and team members. It helped me highlight the real needs. We had two users: a team leader who leads a team of around 10 team members, and a team member — both working in planned shifts. On the basis of the data collected, I created two user personas.

Key insights

Key Findings

I gathered all the information captured in interviews and understanding of the personas, then made a note of all the findings.

Team Leader

A team leader analyzes his team members’ productivity and assigns shifts.

Does

• Plans shifts, leaves, overtime, compensation, etc. for the team members.
• Analyzes productivity of team at individual and team level.

Problem

• Has very little time to manually check the logged efforts from documents.

Needs

• To ensure that his/her teams are timely completing shift times/overtime/compensations and know their efficiency.
• To know the less optimal tasks, or tasks taking up more of the team’s time.
• To know team members who might need extra training or assistance.
• To know who performed well throughout the day, month, quarter, and year.
• To plan shifts for one or more team members in a way that keeps everyone aware of the shift plan, leave, compensation, and overtime of all team members.

Team Member

A team member enters his efforts and also tracks them on a daily basis.

Does

• Works on their system and notes their daily efforts.

Problem

• Has to switch between tasks to manually log each task completed.
• Might easily forget to log tasks.

Needs

• To improve concentration while working on tasks.
• To get an overview of how many hours are logged.
• To know their efficiency.

The challenge

Process

From five user scenarios to a design solution

Sprint 1: Ideation

Now that our main problems were revealed, I started brainstorming and bringing out all possible solutions. I worked with my team daily to ensure all business requirements were met, and that I was on the right track solving the right problem.

User scenarios

We defined five scenarios for the given problem:

1. Team leads should be able to analyze the productivity of their team.
2. Team leads should be able to look at the team members working currently, and their future planned working days, at a glance.
3. Team leads should be able to plan shifts for their team members.
4. Team members and team leaders should be able to input their tasks.
5. Team members and team leaders should be able to track their productivity.

Sprint 2: Design Solution

Testing

Tested at every fidelity, with more than 76% positive feedback

Impact

From 4.5 hours to 1.2 hours, and a 70% acquisition lift in the first month

1. Reduced average task completion time from 4.5 hours to 1.2 hours.
2. Achieved a 70% customer acquisition rate within one month of launching the MVP.

Learnings

Asking “why” shaped the solution more than any single interview did