Redesign Case Study: Workforce Management
Timeline
Two Months
Role
Product Designer
Deliverable
Mobile Application
Tools
Sketch and Principle
Background & Why Redesign?
UKG Kronos is a mobile app made for business workforce management where 40+ million employees have full access to their accounts within their company. Many user complaints comes from poorly designed systems with little to no visual clarity between texts and color scheme, as well as little functionality compared to its website counterpart. As of currently, the app sits at a poorly rated 1.5 out of 5 stars on the App Store and Play Store.
Understanding the Problem
There are two versions of the UKG Kronos app, one being for employees and the other is for super management roles. In this study, I’m going to focus on the problems through the employee’s pain points rather than the eyes of managers and supervisors. As a former employee of an ice cream production company that utilizes UKG Kronos day to day basis, I have personally used the UKG Kronos app myself everyday for two summer seasonal years and have personally experience the feature of the app.
Primary Goal
Secondary Goal
Configure a design system and solve the current design pattern to upscale the value of user centered focus navigating experience in the UKG mobile app.
Take full ownership of involvement roles in designing a product such as a User Researcher, UX Designer and UI Designer.
Incorporate functionalities from web and conceptualize new features into mobile application to enhance user usability and boost productivity.
Enhance my learning experience by engaging in challenging design decisions and coming up with proper solutions.
Larger images may take longer to load, thank you for understanding!
App Analysis
The main interface is out of date, confusing and cluttered that makes it difficult to read and understand about one piece of information correctly.
Although I’ve had experience with the app, an in-depth analysis is still necessary. Throughout the analysis, I primarily focus on breaking down the app’s main functionalities, overall architectures, and navigation system.
To make sure my opinions aren’t biased, I invited 10 coworkers for an online and in-person interview to get better feedback. My user research consists of 6 males and 4 females with the aged range between 32 - 50 years old. Each interview lasted 30-40 minutes in total. In these interviews, I’m specifically targeting the app’s main usability design and how it affected the employees’ navigation and usability overall of the app.
Takeaways
More than half the participants mention that they have difficulties knowing whether or not they reached their end-goal due to lack of feedback responses.
Almost all the interviewees log in just to check for their pay stub, which is unavailable in the mobile app.
Most of the participants admit that they can’t get from point A to point B (a feeling of hostility) without being lost and prefer to use the web application instead.
Employees express wanting a chat feature being added into the app so they can message each other much easier.
All the interviewees have struggled understanding how to read their timecard because the hours bleed into the next day and causes unorganized visual clarity.
The participants talk about accidentally clicking on something and not having a choice to cancel the action. Example being accidentally clicking on the log out button, participants wish they can cancel the logout process or confirm if they want to log out instead of being logged out right away.
Usability Violations
After closely analyzing the design systematic for UKG Kronos and gathering employees’ pain points. I was able to draw some general key factors of heuristic violations that do not match the usability guidelines.
Violations
Reasons
Poorly designed and alignment within colors, buttons, texts and icons that does not resemble visual clues and result in presentation error.
Users had difficulties identifying main differences between timecard and schedule page which lead to mistakenly reading their shift wrong.
Actions interaction have no feedback responses to correspond to a specific task performed by users, resulting in unclear translation and loss of interest.
Users landed on the Pay Code page of the app and were unsure how to leave the page because the home button was missing, resulting in them restarting the app and logging back entirely.
Poor design systems lead to inconsistency and lower standards to the users and causes confusion and frustrations.
Users could not locate and understand a specific icon or button to complete a certain task.
Touch buttons response to clicks immediately and do not allow users to drag their finger away to cancel the action, resulting in many accidental clicks.
Users accidentally clicked on the “cancel request” button on a time off request with no confirmation message which led to users having to redo the entire request again.
I carefully analyzed the app’s UI across its mobile and web browser application to plan out all possible details that will be in my final design. By finding out what works best, I am able to prototype proper solutions for the main screens before finalizing on high fidelity designs.
Sign-in Screens
Home Screen
Notification Screens (Formerly Alerts)
Timecard Screens
Schedule Screens
Requests Screens
To validate my app, I surveyed the same 10 people with my prototype alongside its user prompts. Each question relates to the features of the redesign so I can check for an increase in performance and usability.I conducted the test with 10 people in person.
I had my subjects follow the prompt questions to see if they can navigate the app successfully with each question increasing in difficulty.
I carefully analyzed the app’s UI across its mobile and web browser application to plan out all possible details that will be in my final design. By finding out what works best, I am able to prototype proper solutions for the main screens before finalizing on high fidelity designs.
Test Results
10/10 users were able to locate and land/click on the requested pages and buttons.
8/10 users successfully opened and viewed a shift date.
9/10 users were able to open the hamburger menu.
7/10 users can leave a comment in their timecard shift.
9/10 users successfully viewed their paystub.
7/10 users can accept a shift swap request.
9/10 users realized that they can swipe horizontally to view more of the notification messages.
6/10 users can find where the Legends keys are located.
9/10 users can successfully dismiss a notification message.
6/10 users can successfully submit a time off request.
What was tough?
The most challenging part was the user research, vision for redesign, and answering the question of “why?” during every design stage I did. In addition, it was also a difficult decision bringing additional features from the website into the mobile app because I can only base my study on the following 10 people. I wasn’t sure how it was all going to affect the other population of UKG Kronos users where they felt that what the mobile version has now is good enough as it is. I find that I love making executive decisions given during the process. I was able to put the users first and how their experience is affected overall based on those decisions.
UKG has a solid foundation on what they can provide to their workforce users, however it is extremely difficult to agree with the statement when their mobile experience is failing drastically with no improvement. The entire redesign was to emphasize better experience for the users, not what UKG Kronos thinks is good for the users.
Self Reflection & Lessons
Redesigning the interface and bringing additional features was not an easy task, right away I knew that it was a lot of work involved, but also understanding the principles of design and how it plays into our everyday world was also an experience that I will never forget.
I’ve realized that working on this case study really emphasizes putting the users first and focusing on centralizing user design can ultimately enhance the user experience by a huge gap. I was able to learn that readjusting a placement of something can result in a smoother experience overall for the users.
All in all, I love the fact that the learning never ends, that product design is always evolving and that it is always a continuous process altogether.I worked hard on the study, and super hard on the finished product! If you have a few second, please consider checking out the product interaction on full display!
Real Life Interactive Prototype
