Background
Our client, the CEO of a local design firm, came with a brief that had multiple layers, from an immediate MVP request to long-term dreams for the product. Nick Chan was my partner designer in this project. In 2.5 weeks, we discovered insights that challenged assumptions in the initial brief through user interviews, pivoted our creative direction after understanding more of the client's goals and constraints, and delivered solutions that could address both the short term and long term plan. We produced research findings, personas, UI designs, brand design, and annotations to hand off to a developer.
The second half of this case study shows an idea that I presented to the client during a concept meeting. The client ended up exploring this route with me further, and mentioned plans to implement it.
The Research
Key Findings
We interviewed 6 people who either works or worked in professions required to submit time sheets. We quickly learned that motivation is not the only problem with time-tracking. It’s not easy to do in several ways:
- it's hard to remember to do
- input formats are not easy or flexible
- it's cumbersome to do the math
- little value or consequence directly affecting the individual
As for charity donation as a motivator, people responded positively, and said that it created a positive feeling towards the company culture. However, when probed, charity donations alone weren't enough to keep them engaged on a daily basis. We discovered other motivators that were more effective with increasing active engagement such as personal gains, competition, visualizing progress, and emphasizing impact.
Solution 1: The Dashboard Plugin Design
Solution 2: Chatbot
As a part of the research for this project, we looked into behavior design principles, because essentially we were trying to get people to turn submitting time sheets into a habit. BJ Fogg's behavior model sums up the 3 criteria for successful habit formation.
The problem I had with the dashboard solutions is that it still didn't address the "trigger" element in making this successful behavior change. It also wasn't super easy to do still. During our user interviews, we found that people would ignore most reminder mechanisms while they're in their workflow, they did not like the interruptions, EXCEPT for their phone notifications. This inspired me with the idea of a chatbot. This addresses the "trigger" element, and also enhances "ability."
Easy to do
SMS is something people are already commonly using. It’s not a new site or app to visit. The input format is also easy, just a reply. The user can interact while on-the-go, not constrained to having to sit at a desktop and log in to something.
Trigger
People don’t like being interrupted in their workflow, but with SMS notification, people can choose to ignore it and come back to it later. Some people allow SMS interruptions with more forgiveness.
Motivation
Gamification such as competition, badge earning, and rewards redemption increases engagement. Visibly seeing impact on charity-of-choice is also important to some people.
What would be next?
- Software engineer to look into available Harvest API to see if this solution is feasible
- Design more robust version of the chatbot. How would the conversation go if the user can submit time directly via SMS? How will we identify project ID, how should the input format of time be so that it's easy for the user but also readable data that can be pushed into to Harvest?
