Leave Tracking

Mobile App

PROJECT INTRODUCTION

Overview

Today, at every digital company, every employee has to interact with an HR management system to plan vacations, requests sick days, plan business trips, and notify when working from home. Let’s re-imagine how leave-tracking can be done without complicated HR software, through a simple and easy-to-use interface.

TIMELINE:

10 weeks

MY ROLE:

UX Research
UX Strategy
Wireframing
Prototyping
Usability Testing

TOOLS:

Sketch
Photoshop
InVision
Principle

Design Question

"HOW MIGHT WE HELP ORGANIZATIONS IMPROVE THE EMPLOYEE VACATION TRACKING EXPERIENCE USING DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY?"

MARKET RESEARCH

Today, there are different ways to manage employee's days off. Let's take a closer look at them.

HR management system - usually uses by established companies. It has different purposes including vacation tracking.
Spreadsheets - uses by small companies or startups because they are small and do not ready for a complicated HR management system. But they still need to manage employee's time off.
Email or Slack message - use by small companies or startups. In this case, there is no one place with employee's days off.

Assumptions

I assume that small companies have a need for a lightweight, simple, intuitive vacation tracking tool. It can be solved with a mobile app. My initial users are all employees in the company. Vacation tracking is an essential part of any business and there will be no friction with employee onboarding. The main competing solutions are spreadsheets and HR management systems. Leave tracking is well-known product category and re-imagining the same features with dramatically better user experience will become a competetive advantage.

Hypothesis

I believe, that there is a better way to make vacation requests and notify a team about an upcoming leave than using spreadsheets. The hypothesis will be validated with the usage data showing continuous user engagement.

Competitor Research

On the "device" axis are shown solutions that optimized to desktop computers, meaning that it can be used mainly by office workers, or on another side -- mobile, meaning that it allows more mobility, e.g. field workers. The "company size" axis represents the size of the customers.

My niche market is small companies where employees tend to use mobile devices more than desktop.

Competitive Matrix

Interviews

Participants: four
Time: 30 minutes
Criteria: manager at a startup or small company with subordinates

Interviews' Findings

The managers who use spreadsheet have too many actions for a simple task such as approve a day off request.
Sometimes the managers forget about someone's upcoming absence.
In some cases, a manager has to duplicate the information regarding upcoming absence into different systems.
The team needs to know about someone's day off.

Business Model Canvas

Business Model Canvas

Challenge

The challenge is to create a better vacation tracking experience for teams without additional administrative overhead.

TARGET AUDIENCE

There are two different roles - a manager and an employee. We will focus on a manager because it is more complex and includes interactions with an employee.

User Epics

The research and exploration that I have done lead me to create a lightweight solution for one of vacation tracking tasks:

APPROVING OR NOT THE VACATION TRACKING REQUESTS

User Journey

Manager Loretta receives a day off request from employee John and she has to make a decision to approve it or not.

Task Flow Diagram

The task flow diagram shows the steps in the request-day-off flow. It represents the structure and interactivity of the future application.

Sketching

After choosing the task flow, the next steps are ideation and sketching possible design solution.

Wireframing

Testing

Two rounds of usability testing
Ten participants

Positives

Clean design
The individual view screen is very well designed
Good IA, easy to navigate

Main concerns

The progress bar on home screen confused
Calendar screen could be represented in a more useful way
Request screen takes a while to understand
Approved label looks like an action button

Solution

Lightweight vacation tracking mobile application where employees can see available vacation days, make a request, and get approval in a short time. Managers can approve vacation requests, check the calendar, and receive notifications about upcoming leaves.

Marketing website

After creating high fidelity mockup the next step is to promote the application. The responsive marketing website is there to promote the application. Visitors can find information about the app, how it works and looks, as well as app store buttons where they can install the app.

InVision Prototype

Next Steps

Subjects that I did not cover:

Employee's interface
Other devices - desktop and watch