Should we redesign the schedule experience for employees?

Planday makes a workforce scheduling tool for restaurants, bars and businesses with shift based workers.

Management approached the design team to ask us to put focus on improving the visual representation of the schedule in the app, for employees.

We decided to start by taking a step back to research the problem space a bit.

Understanding how employees use the app

We conducted 8 interviews with employees in different industries. We asked them to tell us about the last time they had used the app, and slowly got a better understanding of how they used the app on a day to day basis.

It was very clear that they used very little time on the schedule. They wanted to see who they should work with on a given day, and that was all they used it for.

Understanding the problem space

However our research showed that employees had a lot of performance issues with the app. Mostly when punching in or out of shifts, which was becoming a big frustration for them.

By taking a more holistic approach to the task, we advocated towards management that we should focus our time on getting the performance of the app back on track first.

“

You can give me a lot of new cool features, but if the app is slow and buggy to use, the features doesn’t matter”

Employee interviewed about the app