Weekly Employee Hours

Company

B2W Software improvement for the B2W Track product.

B2W Track is a field tracking solution for construction companies where they can track production on their jobs along with employee & equipment hours, materials delivered and used, and more. This data allows companies to make informed decisions to keep their jobs running on time and under budget.

Project Date

2019-2020

My Role

On this project, I primarily worked on a team of three people that included the Product Manager, Development Lead and myself. I was responsible for leading the UX work for this feature. In the early phase of the project, I was involved with customer research, finalizing requirements, and conceptual wireframes. As we better understood the feature, I put together two sets of prototypes that we reviewed with customers to narrow down our functionality and layout. Once we finalized the workflow, I created final screens, labeled them with relevant design patterns and worked with the development team to make necessary adjustments to the screens.

The Problem

Customers need a single place to review the hours entered by employee to ensure their hours were categories correctly (overtime/double time) based on the work rules for their business unit and any vacation or training time that has been entered.

Project summary

One of the challenges for users of B2W Track when capturing employee hours is that hours are entered by day. There isn’t insight into hours worked on past days. For companies who use work rules (overtime and double time), the person in the field doesn’t know where to apply hours. In the past a feature was added to give these users insight in the total hours previously entered in the week.

This feature was initially prioritized because a new customer needed a way to automatically allocate weekly hours to overtime and double time based on their work rules. They didn’t want the foreman on the job to have to make these calculations. They also wanted to review these changes before making them permanent because there are some exceptions to existing rules, like paid vacation days.

In addition to this customer’s request, we reviewed other customer asks and found a need for a view to highlight where current hours are not correctly allocated.

The Challenge

We were trying to solve different types of problems for different customers with one feature. Below are two types of customers that we talked to.

• Customer 1 wants to automatically apply overtime hours to employees and make adjustments to the auto allocation based on existing Field Log notes.
• Customer 2 would like to highlight where overtime or double time hours may need to be applied with the ability to adjust them.

Requirements

• Ability to view all reported hours by date for all employees over a weekly pay period
• Ability to edit hours from this view to change the number of hours and/or type (RT/OT)
• Ability to “push” changes back to individual field logs on which hours are originally reported
• Ability to “auto-distribute overtime” hours based on pre-established business rules
  • Weekly rule: all hours over 40 per week are overtime
  • Daily rule: all hours over 8 per day are overtime
  • Combination rule: hours over 8 per day are overtime and over 40 hours per week are overtime.
• Employee hours should be grouped by job and labor type. They needed visibility to Field Log information like notes, and foreman so that the finance team member can determine the correct adjustments.
• The list of employees could be as many as 500. The feature will need to use virtual scrolling to manage this many employees.
• Ability to search for a particular employee or foreman or filter employees of a single business unit.

The Solution

Once we had the requirements, I worked out a few different layouts for solving this problem. Some early concepts are below:

Working with the team, we shared feedback and chose the best two approaches. I turned these into two sets of prototypes using a typical workflow. We used these to reconnect with customers and narrow down our direction. In the end, our views were a mix of elements of these prototypes.

When stories were written, I updated the screens and labeled them for development. I noted and linked to any design patterns that were used. If there was a new design pattern or an update to an existing pattern, I made these changes before the stories were brought into the sprint. I also defined states, colors, icons, etc. A few sample marked up screens are below:

As development progressed, we adapted our screens again to solve technical challenges.

• We adapted the row height to be consistent so virtual scrolling could be applied.
• We moved the comments to the context of the date field and added a tooltip so the user can access the full note text.
• We created a new date selector so that the user can select their days more easily.

This feature is scheduled to be released in early 2021. As it releases, we will plan user testing to include this functionality, talk to customers using the feature to identify improvements and watch the customer idea portal for ways we can improve this feature.

Final Views

Benefits

In our latest call with the primary customer behind this feature, one of their employees said the feature will meet and exceed their needs. We expect this feature to be released in early 2021. Once it is available, we will reconnect with customers to see how the functionality is working for them. We expect this feature will save time for the accounting team. We also expect that some companies will no longer ask field personnel to calculate work rules when entering hours because it can be adjusted easily in the office.