Company
B2W Software improvement for B2W Schedule
B2W Schedule is used by construction companies to streamline the scheduling process. Employees from various departments can schedule their resources while having visibility to the activities of the departments they work with. This increases collaboration and gives the company greater agility with their work.
Project Date
2019-2020
My Role
I worked as the Lead User Experience Designer on this project alongside a UX Coop, Product Manager, Business Analyst, and a Development Lead. I was responsible for customer research, wireframes, prototypes, defining the styling for implementation and directing the coop.
The Problem
Employees spend too much time on the phone calling other employees about where they need to go tomorrow and what they are supposed to accomplish. They need a simple way to send assignments to the employees on their jobs.
Project Summary
The Schedule product allows users to assign crews and individuals to work on their jobsite. With this feature, the dispatcher would like to send individuals on a jobsite their next assignment if something has changed. He would also like to send the crew foreman details of the crew’s next assignment. To understand the need around notifications, we setup calls with 11 customers and also a call with coworkers who are in regular communication with customers. To prepare for the calls, I met with the Product Manager, Business Analyst, and UX Coop to prepare questions for the customer interviews. We collaborated to come up with a good question set. I am always careful to make sure we ask open ended questions to get the best information from customers. Some sample customer questions are below.
- Who manages notifications at your company?
- How do you notify production employees of their work assignments?
- Who is being notified?
- What information is sent?
- When (what time of day) are employees notified of a new assignment?
- At what point in your scheduling workflow would you want to trigger a notification for employees, crews, etc.?
- How does an employee confirm their assignment?
- Do you have a process for modified or cancelled assignments?
For crew notifications, we found that some companies have the foreman communicate the next assignment to the employees, while others have someone in the office who notifies the employees. While the content of the notification differed, we found a number of consistencies. Through our early calls, we had enough information to narrow down our feature requirements. We made follow-up calls with these customers after our initial concepts were ready to see if we were on the right track and identify what else needed to be changed. Our research covered both crew and employee notifications together and we decided to separate crew and employee notifications into two features. The crew notifications would be built at a later time and the employee notification feature is described below.
The Challenge
- The dispatcher needs a way to view which employees need to be notified of their next assignment and then a way to send that notification.
- The system needs to track each employee’s preferred contact method along with their email address, phone numbers and errors if these contact methods didn’t work.
- The employee needs to be able to receive their assignment on their phone through text or email along with any messages from the dispatcher.
- Sometimes the employee will be on multiple jobs in a day or could have two assignments at the same job. They will also need to be notified if their assignment changes.
- The assignment notification should include job name, address, job supervisor, start date and time, crew foreman and dispatcher notes.
The Solution
Our coop built the wireframes for this feature along with the prototype that we reviewed with customers.
This is the set that we used in our secondary conversations with customers. In these calls, we learned that the notification methods and options for notifying were on the right track. Our primary feedback was around the content of the notification. Since most customers currently notify their employees personally and can say anything, it took some work to find the right level of content for the notification. We decided to include the dispatcher comment to cover information not included in the notification.
Our coop came up with a smart improvement to the layout and organized the employees in the panel as a grid. Not long after this, his coop ended and I completed the UX work for this feature. I applied the grid to the existing wireframes and began making updates to the notifications to include special cases like notifications for an employee working on multiple jobs in a day.
The screen below shows the variations of what could be displayed in the grid along with the tooltip shown for warnings.
I created a document to provide styling details to the development team.
We added the comments to the bottom of the panel in a way that is not intrusive.
I added samples of notifications to multiple jobs.
I provided styling details to the team for the email alert.
After the release of this feature, we held user testing that included the process of sending an employee notification. The users found this portion of the test intuitive to use and we did not have any significant changes to this area of the product.
We will continue to talk to customers about the content of the notification and how the functionality is working for our customers. The crew notification feature has not been prioritized for development yet. Once it is, we will be talking to customers again around notifications and if other changes need made to this functionality, we will handle it at that time.
Benefits
Our customers were able to save time by not having to call every individual. They were also able to better handle last-minute changes by quickly notifying the customer. A trainer passed on customer feedback and told us the notifications were “a game-changer for them.”
Updates
We reviewed customer feedback in the summer of 2021 and worked on a set of notification enhancements. This included a way to add additional information to the notification. Soon we will implement crew notifications and a feature for the employees to accept or reject an assignment.