🗓 Timesheet app
The brief
The main aim is to simplify and automate the current process of entering worked hours. The way to reach this goal is to create a new application for employees, managers and the controlling team.
Discover phase
It all started with research. The scenario included profiling questions and some to gather general overview of the team, daily routine at work and impressions about the company's processes. It also contained few questions about current reporting time tool and the process of filling up the time sheets.
Summary
Research phase took around a week - as a team of four we managed to interview 9 people during this time. We identified 3 different roles: Employees, Managers and Administrators.
Research report
The most important discovery was that the problem was not the tool but the process full of manual work. It occurred that almost 70% of employees in the company are fully allocated for one project and their time sheet looks the same each month. They had to insert the number of hours (usually 8) for each day of the month separately. Then managers have to go to the profile of each team member and accept the reports one by one. At the end administrators have to check every report correctness with the data, they store in their own Excel sheet because they didn't trust the tool itself.
Persona
Prototype
The prototype included a monthly report overview with project allocation and days off for each employee. The main assumption was that the application could fill-up reports automatically - based on archived data and capacity allocation. Thanks to that - users wouldn't have to open the tool unless they want to change something.
Manager's view consisted of a list of team members. There is a possibility to accept each person's report. There is also an option to select several people and accept their report via bulk action buttons. People, who made any manual changes to their reports or those, who don't have full allocation are highlighted with an exclamation mark icon. There is also no possibility to accept such reports on the main screen. The manager has to open the reports to be able to confirm them. This way there is limited risk accepting possibly incorrect reports.
The most complicated thing was designing a view for an administrator. The financial controlling team faced the problem of too much manual work. They stayed overtime at the end of each month! The reason was incorrect data - it wasn't synchronized with other applications e.g. sick-leave register. The team had to check each employee's data manually. When something was not the same as in the other tools - they had to make corrections. We assumed that automating the process for employees will help them with data correctness.
Another problem was deadlines. People didn't care about the dates set by the financial controlling team because they knew it wouldn't affect their payroll. The new design promoted statistics about submitted reports and highlighted those managers, who didn't accept employees' time sheets. This way work of administrators was limited only to those few people instead of the whole company as previously.
Challenges
The main limitation was brand color pallet and the lack of a corporate design system. The main design system used in the company is Material Design, so most components have to be aligned with it.
