Building better workforce registry
for construction worker
Building better workforce registry
for construction worker
Building better workforce registry
for construction worker
Trimble want to redesign Workforce Registry application for construction worker.
This is the story of designing ‘Useful, Usable and meaningful’ - a responsive
web app that empowers Construction Site Professionals to provide
better access, safety and manage for their labours.
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential
information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and
does not necessarily reflect the views of Trimble.
The Challenges
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Identify the main customer journeys and persona types that needed to be the points of focus.
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Undertake an heuristic analysis/expert review of the CrewSight user journeys to identify user experience problem areas.
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Identify how effectively the site navigation will support users to the main tasks to be completed.
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Transfer these elements in to a list of actionable insight that could be implemented by the core development team.
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Determine a list of next actionable insight for ongoing work.
My Role
I was responsible for workforce experience strategy and design of the responsive app. I lead the UX work, producing all major deliverables and presenting these to the product owners and internal team stakeholders. I worked alongside a interaction designer and visual designer.
Research, Interviewing stakeholders and end users, synthesis data, prototyping, usability testing and collaborated with multi-disciplinary team.
I designed up and presented works to gain buy‐in from executives, senior stakeholders and many other internal teams throughout the project lifecycle.
Designed iOS, Android and Web. I executed journeys, wireframes, prototypes and design specs.
I stopped working on the project on MVP 2. The app launched globally and moved project to specific domain in Trimble division.
The Approach
Focusing on Goals
Redesign brief was to build improve better technical performance and visual clean up than our competitors, we recommended to build app useful, usable and meaning to the target users. We were thrilled by the opportunity to create something meaningful.
UX hierarchy of needs heavily influenced to our product strategy.
A collaborative culture with lean UX
We opted for a lean approach which emphasised rapid sketching, prototyping, user feedback and design mockups. It’s created a strong sense of ownership across different disciplines within my organisation.
Build twice deploy everywhere
Because of the project timeline and fixed date, we opted to build the app using the Bootstrap and Angular Framework which allowed for code reuse and deployment of builds cross‑platform. In hindsight, this was a poor choice that heavily compromised the user experience.
Starting on the same page
Meeting with key stakeholders helped us to understand their business challenges. Together we identified risks and aligned on expectations and constructed a shared vision for the responsive app. Following this, I crafted an experience strategy outlining our phased approach and direction for the workforce management app.
The Discovery
The discovery phase was a quick, the detailed finding was us Construction Industry General Contractors needs to manage a workforce comprised of a day labor, full time employees and employees of subcontractors.
After designating workforce persona types and aligning this with our phasing strategy we were able to prioritise who we would be focusing on supporting in the early stages. The MVP1 app focused on supporting the goals of office admin and project manager personas.
We used personas constantly throughout the project to guide design decisions, priorities and create empathy to target users and our team.
Our persona consisted different archetypes which we used to facilitate discussions about our users needs, desires and varying contexts of use. Through careful analysis of our research, we identified sufficient behavioural variables to segment our user group. These variables could be categorised into activities such as frequency of use of the scheme, skills such as workforce confidence and motivations such as reasons for workforce. We discussed the personas with our stakeholders to develop a clear picture of who the design of the app would target in phase 1 and later in future releases.
The Vision
Our vision was to help target users get more pleasure out of it. We wanted to become an enabler for a better Workforce Management.
Minimise the bad
Our key priority for the early phases was to focus on workforce primary user goals. Our first task–stripping the responsive app to its core and focus on usability and convenience.
Amplify the good
Beyond the obvious features, we saw opportunities to build a deep emotional connection with our users. Our vision was to create a simple app.
Bringing workforce better
We envisioned empowering workforce culture, where General Contractors can manage different types of labor and employees.
The Requirements
Designing for what users want to know, do & feel
Synthesising user goals from our research which we could consider not only what the app should do, but also how it should feel. We believed this would be the difference between delivering a good experience and a great one.
Extracting requirements with user mental models
Combing through our research and brainstorming the different things what target users are doing and what they want to do. It allowed me to come up with a broad set of tasks–quickly. I categorised and segmented the tasks into behavioural affinities and aligned features. This gave me a way to visualise what existing functionality and content would be useful, what tasks needed supporting, what opportunities were available to innovate and also what could be discarded from the existing app.
This informed our phasing strategy for the app, the product feature roadmap and the product backlog.
Brand and experience requirements
Understanding the usage contexts of the app helped me develop a clear vision of the expectations of our users. To communicate the personality of our app to stakeholders and team, we developed a set of experience principles. The principles were used constantly to drive the aesthetic, feel and overall direction of the app.
Create a sense of togetherness
Connect to workforce from any location or device.
Improve health and safety
Quick access to emergency information in case of accidents on site
Be simple. Be focussed.
Simplifies the management of labor information and document compliance relating specifically for the construction industry.
Be encouraging
Deliver value at real-time
The Framework
Setting the design direction
Applied top‐down approach to defining the overall structure of the experience. Sketching and storyboarding,
I generated stacks of ideas about the arrangement of UI, functional and data elements, and interactive behaviours.
Structuring the experience
After identifying the our main scenarios, I defined the primary pathways our Project Manager personas would explore through the app. Crafting several key user journeys for each of our personas, was the best way to conceptualise and structure the proposed content and functionality.
Key persona scenario:
James expecting workers should self enrolment by themselves. Keep track of all workers on current project and exclude workers from certain areas of the building once completed. During emergency time he needs to alert to all workers and needs to plan for upcoming projects and should send workforce reports daily to his manager.
Workforce registry HEART framework
Highly influenced by Google HEART Framework
Happiness
Happiness is a calculation of customer/user emotion. The plan is to measure through NPS scores and user surveys. By measuring happiness over time, we can understand the direction of Workforce is pleasing to customers/users.
By coordinating satisfaction survey with our latest redesign and feature rollout, can interpret the data to correlate with the change.
Engagement
We defined user engagement based on user experience research report as the user’s level of involvement with the Workforce Management app.
Here few examples to increase user engagement:
Cross product connect: Single-sign with one-click
AllTrak is one of our most popular product to track construction industry assets. We proposed to connect Workforce Registry with AllTrak, so it will be a hub of tracking construction labor and assets.
Register bulk workers
When users are keep registering multiple workers at a time, we inform to users to use ‘Bulk worker registration’.
Adoption
Applied user adoption in our product strategically to set of new features for existing and new user groups.
Here an example to adopt user in new feature:
User onboarding - Customize the form for their business
This tour serves to educate new users for this complicated feature. Our aim is to mitigate initial friction of guessing ‘where to go first, how to create own easy form, which UI element need to use for their need’ to existing and new users. It can be interpreted that it successfully increases platform adoption.
Retention
Workforce app retention is one of the important driver of our revenue. Its measurement of conversion, active users, error reduction and etc.
Task Success
We are enabling ‘and/or’ surfacing common flows, to execute faster task to users. It will lead to increase user efficient and will make quick adopt to the product features.
Interface and interaction framework
We have applied Trimble standard design guidelines for our interface to maintain Trimble product consistency.
For interaction applied bootstrap and angular design framework to build it fast and cheaper towards fixed timeline.
Overall, we motivate and demonstrate a can-do attitude to show our Workforce customers what good things are possible currently. We provided the right information at the right time. Having "just enough" is better than "all the things”.
We use clear, plain-spoken language, avoid industry jargon, and are mindful of using references that may confuse users of different cultures.
Mobile first strategy
Based on our research we applied mobile first strategy to the product.
these are the mobile prototype design. Used UXPin app to create prototype design.
Detailed design
The gallery shows the final responsive app for launch.
Worker Form Customization
Customize forms and documents to capture the exact information the way every customer doing business. Easy drag & drop fields to get the information customer need on every worker. Ensure every worker has the right documentation to be on site configure.
Office Admin / Project Manager can easily customize the worker form. This interface is live preview user’s every action will response in the form area. Initially through guide tour can understand the interface and later also easily can understand the usage of each UI components from ‘Information icon/tooltip’.
Worker Registration
Office Admin / Project Manager can onboard the workers on the spot. They can enter worker information on mobile, tablet, laptop, or desktop from the jobsite or office. And they can present NDAs, Safe Practice Agreements and other documents to workers on mobile devices for e-signing.
Multiple worker registration can be done easily through MS Excel templates.
Export Workers
Users can filter and download workforce data easily based on the report need to facilitate compliance with management. And proactively reach out workers whose license going to expire, download and share worker signed documents like NDA, codes of safe and etc.
Broadcast Messages
All responsible users can send broadcast messages to everyone on site, or specific trades or companies. Text, e-mail or call direct from the application to get in touch with the right people quickly and send alerts on incoming bad weather, or power outages.
Validation - Testing Our Assumptions
Later stage stakeholders finalised ’Self Enrolment’ feature should keep it in Workforce Management application which is good to have. But we stressed to keep the same ‘Worker Registration’ interface design for ‘Self Enrolment’. Self enrolment interface is for worker who can register by themselves.
After analyzing the most basic use cases, I have decided that a usability test is needed to test with at least 10 end users and prepared test scripts.
We worked closely with our product owner to contact the usability test.
Methodology
During the usability assessment consisted of an introduction, 1 task, a short interview, and a post-test questionnaire (QUIS scale). Have instructed the participants to think out loud and share their thoughts with the researcher(product owner) throughout the test. Sessions were performed on an individual basis with each session lasting approximately 30 minutes. Following the last session, qualitative and quantitative data were analyzed and summarized in recommendations section.
Scenarios & Tasks
Based on research and hypotheses, have formed a test-scenario and a tasks that were read and assigned to participants during the test. Participant asked need to do self registration in Workforce Management application. Task: Added 8 new UDF fields and 12 signature in NDA section to test with participants.
Interface
Results
Participants comments
• The user tasks are identified very wisely.
• User interface is impressive.
• Responsiveness on any device is impressive thing.
• The look and feel of the application looks really interesting.
• Operations are easy though faced few difficulties.
• Color combinations are great. Pleasing to eyes
• Error messages were not very clear to understand which field is required.
• Date picker is not very user friendly. I didn't know that clicking on the year, all the years shall be displayed.
• The control options for photo edit, seem confusing.
• Toggle was confusing
• Difficulty with non disclosure section. (Rich text features)
Proposed all recommendation to new team to change the both registration self enrolment and workforce professional onboarding workers interface.
The Impact
Positive results and much more to do
The redesign of the app on mobile and web has had a positive impact on the customer experience. We improved on key engagement, retention and adoption.
Worked extremely hard to get the product offering to this point. It is not an easy task to start with a blank slate, busy product owner, and produce a functioning product our customers actually want to buy, have accomplished this.
I consider myself lucky to have the experience of working with a team of that's made up of good people with the right attitude. It has been a pleasure.
Satyan Shah
Product Owner | Technical Director | Product Delivery Head
Succeeded in a very agile manner to deliver a solid application. This has been an incredible journey that allowed ICT to show skills in Agility, entrepreneurship and understanding customer needs and applications.
It was a huge opportunity for our team members too, to learn new technologies and show how to work effectively and highly motivated in a small cross-functional team.
Luca
Engineer Director