How I designed an app in 5 days about planning your team’s vacation.
An approach to a designer design-thinking process.
A few days ago I presented my project YOUGO, it was a 1 week individual project about designing a new software as a service (SaaS) desktop web app for companies to use internally and I presented it at IRONHACK in Barcelona.
I started doing research on the market and meeting with employees to determine the needs of the business, where I found insights about holidays and then developing an MVP based upon my findings. I decided to do an easy and quick software for the users where I started using the Design Thinking process in order to do the project.
Design Thinking is a method designers use in ideation and development. The method describes a human-centered, iterative design process consisting of 5 steps — Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.
In this stage you set aside your own assumptions about deciding your holiday vacation at work in order to gain insight into the users and their needs when they are using the Saas app.
I started doing some research on the internet in order to be updated with the latest softwares on the market and then finding some employees from companies from my city (Barcelona), to get a meeting with them and determine the needs of their business .
I went to see a manager from the startup Glovo, an employee from ADP and another manager and employee from Tekman Education. I interviewed them by creating questions about all the Saas platforms that they use and analyse every word that they said in order to discover if they actually had any pain point that they hadn’t realized yet but never saying directly questions about if they actually had pain points.
What I got from them was that they use some sheet papers before going into the software. Also that some of them used a difficult software to understand.
With those interviews I cleared my mind and I decided to focus my project on the vacation category because all the interviews had talked about vacation, apart from others softwares, and also they have problems in common when talking about vacation. For example, they last when deciding the vacation, they first use paper sheets before going into to fill the software… The fact of having vacation topic in common makes me think that could be the prompt to start.
Later I did a competitive analysis in order to look for the different features that softwares use and which structure do they use to understand better the market. Also I did a quick survey and only got 6 answers, but all of them were useful for the research because I got the same answers as in the interviews.
Finally I gathered all my results from the interviews and survey and I realise that I had deeper insights that I thought. I found out from survey (6 answers):
In define is where we put together our findings about Saas platforms users and we analyze our observations and synthesize them in order to define the core problems.
Once I had all the insights I put all of them together through the affinity diagram. The interviews showed me 5 groups (pink post-its) which I organised them depending on the topic that they were really going into. So I tried to connect them and they were:
I decided to leave the decisions and usability group for a more advanced stage, about wire-framing.
My next step was to think about a problem statement that better represents my goal because in case of getting lost during the design thinking process I could always look at that sentence and remember what my goal was. So as I had interviewed managers and employees I had two problems statements:
I have created the User Persona gathering all the research done before and the problem statement in order to have someone to look at when getting lost.
As in the problem statement, I had two personas, the employee and her manager.
On the third stage you are ready to start generating ideas about that issue. With the knowledge you have gathered you can start “thinking outside the box” to identify new solutions to both the problem statement created.
So at this point I knew what the problem was and who I was designing for. I started sketching which is the easiest and coolest way of doing the brainstorming and coming up with ideas to solve the problem.
The idea was to make the user flow shorter and easier so that they would prefer to take this software instead of the others on the market. I started thinking ways of showing just the mvp on one or two screen, the less and easier the better.
In the Prototype and Testing phase of Design Thinking, you produce a number of inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product or specific features found within the product so you can investigate the problem solutions generated in the previous stage and test it with users and start iterating till you get your best prototype that better fits their pain point.
I started with a paper prototype sketching out more detailed wireframes of the app which then I tested with users. Although I had a clear idea after the research and the ideation part I did several different paper prototypes and I tested all of them to see if they actually worked.
Later on I started iterating on the low-midd fidelity prototype because the tests that I did really worked. The users did understand the basic flow.
On the 1 screen I maintained the whole year calendar but then I realised that it wasn’t useful for the users.
Then on the 2. I put a month calendar in order to see the actual month and in the 1. and 2. you could change the screen to your profile to yours team visualization by clicking on the works on the top. It wasn’t useful at all and the flow was slow, also I wanted to add the known FAB button in order to “add an action”, like add time-off.
On the 3. screen, I wanted to give more importance to the big month calendar. I tested 3 times and I could see that the third option was to better for the user, and I encouraged me to start with some of the high-fidelity. (I would have liked to tested it more times with more days of project).
In the high fidelity stage I also did several iterations as you can see below, about maintaining the FAB button or not, and to put the pending tasks in the same main user screen instead of taking it to another. (I had the idea of maintaining the FAB button because in my previous research it was actually a popular and easy button that most of the apps uses to “add an action”.)
On the second one, I create a bell to have all the tasks that your manager had sent to you before but it was a repetitive feature with the pending task part.
So again, after 2 more tests I finally change the FAB button that users didn’t understand into a simple button “add time-off” and also I did a two scrollable columns on the right to have the year calendar and the upcoming time off.
In the images below you can see which screen solve the pain point that I was focusing on.
Now I’m going to describe the scenario to imagine better the app flow, I will explain just the manager flow because it is the more complex. So let’s imagine that you are Rachel the manager and it’s getting summer time and you have been said to enter you vacation days and your team vacation days.
This is the first screen when you enter and you can see your days resquested and also the days that you are pending to approve. Also you can see that on the tap navigation bar you have an advise for the team visualization.
You would like to add first your vacation days and so you click on “add time-off” button and go directly to that pop up. On type, you click on vacation days and after choosing the dates you click send now. In the previous screen you can see the days you have requested to your managed and that are pending with an hourglass.
Later on, you go to your team screen and by clicking on the red rounded rectangles you can decided whether to accept or not your team requests and you can see the month visualization to take an idea if some of them want to go for vacation at the same time.
Finally, as I didn’t have enough time to develop the whole Saas Software I thought about which could be the next features and flows to add in my app. I list it into the most important to the less one.
What I have learned in this project is:
I hope you all find my project helpful for you and I’m always keen to hear feedbacks and learn from that.
How I designed an app in 5 days about planning your team’s vacation.
Research & References of How I designed an app in 5 days about planning your team’s vacation.|A&C Accounting And Tax Services
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