The Story
In many companies we have a system where employee’s time record (work hour efforts) is recorded and maintained for time and effort estimation which it turns out to billing records. Some companies capture the employee effort records either on weekly, monthly or quarterly bases by either submitting the time records through application or by manual pen paper workbook notes.
One day I got a chance to interactive with some of my friends and colleagues from other industries to understand how this system works and how their experience is. To get deep into, tried asking few questions like what are the problems and challenges they are facing while using the current application in their industry, which in return made me to come up with a concept for the time record system.
Problem
Stared with a concept considering a problem where employees submit their time records on “weekly” basis. Interviewed some of my friends to understand how they interact with the application. Every end of the week employee had to submit the work effort (in hours) under respective projects. They have to search the project details manually either ID or project name for which he/she is allocated to. Enter the effort hours manually which can be same for the entire week i.e. 8 hours/day. Also system captures/records employee Login in and Logout time on daily basis which will be compared later with submitted hours be employee.
Once submitted, it is sent for approval to verify whether the submitted hours are correct and matched as required. The approver verifies and approves or rejects the submitted hours back to the employee for resubmition.
Solution
After understand the problem statement there seems to be more of manual work involved. After doing some research and analysis, tried to figure out how we can automate the some of the initial manual work efforts to reduce the extra efforts and time.
Here are some pointers. The project details can be auto filled as per his/her allocations, Reduce manual search for project for which he/she is allocated to, it can be auto populated as per allocations. Next, avoid manual entry of efforts, it can be auto filled with 8 hrs by default with edit option, this will avoid manual entering for each and every time. Filtering the projects by Project, Not Submitted, Rejected, Approved and such. Approver can easily filter out the submitted hours by project and can easily take the action of approve/reject within one-two clicks.
| Project
This is a Hybrid App named “TimeApp” which consists of initial phase of design only i.e.,
Research > Analysis > Wire-frames > Visual Design
Analysis and Flows
Iterated the application flow considering 2 user personas i.e. Employee and Approver. This is basic flow of interaction where Employee can submit the efforts for approval and approves can accept or reject it.
Wireframe
Once we have the user journey’s handy, directly jumping to actual UI design, would like to sketch the user flows with pen/pencil and paper. This helps me to ideate the user’s interaction with the application.
On boarding user flows
Low fidelity design on user journey
User Interface Design
Playing with colors was a challenging task. Wanted to keep it as simple as possible and White color was more effective for simplicity. Gradient is one of the current trend. Now a days most of the designs follow the gradient shades. Playing with gradient bought me the best and perfect choice for Background images and buttons.
Below are some glimpse of visual screens for TimeApp.
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Scope:
Research and Analysis, UX design, Visual design
Timeline:
Mar 2018 - April 2018
Tools:
Adobe XD, Illustrator, After Effect, Pencil/Pen Paper.
Thank you so much for your time.
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