UX research, Web design, prototyping
Project context
HRMS is a web platform to make performance tracking easy for project leads. HRMS guides the user to track their contract staff’s details and performance to help project leads identify areas of improvement. With this data, project leads can develop a plan to enhance the efficiency of the work done within the project. In addition, having this database of past and current contract staff performance can inform future projects which contract staff would be a good fit for their project.
Details
Role: UX designer (team of 2) of DSTA
Skills focus: UX research, user flows, wireframing, prototyping, usability testing
Timeframe: May – Sept 2021
Background
The project started from an incident that occurred, where a contract staff did not return all the organisation’s assets. From this incident, it highlighted that there could possibly be an issue with the way contract IT staff details are tracked today. Separately, upper management had also highlighted that these contract staff have no regular performance measurement and review processes.
From these, our initial hypothesis was that:
"Tracking contract staff details and assets was a very manual process; it is done by local spreadsheet files and updated each other through emails."
Interviews
To understand the issue on the ground better, we set out todo user interviews with relevant stakeholders including project leads whomanage contract staff, admin staff who aid project leads with contract staffmatters, and managers who oversee project leads.
While our original hypothesis was proven true, it had turned out that the more severe problem to focus on was regarding the quality of contract staff, and consequently, the quality of work done in projects. From the interviews, the team derived the following main problem statements to focus on.
1. Before hiring: PMTs need a reliable way to assess the potential of contract staff because they want to know if the contract staff should be hired.
2. After hiring: PMTs need a consistent and trackable way to manage contract staff performance because PMTs want theirprojects to be delivered more efficiently
3. PMTs need a centralized and trackable way to manage contract staff information and assets because they want to save time on admin processes - time which could be spent better elsewhere.
4. Upper management need a consistent way to assess the performance and quality of contract staff because they need data to drive hiring decisions and contractual KPIs adjustments.
Storyboarding
And thus, we set off to build HRMS, a yelp for contractors that tracks their performance, reviews and information.
Information Architecture & User flows
With the offerings in mind, the team proceeded to map out the information architecture of platform and user flows of certain tasks to serve as a guide when designing the screens later.
A couple of sketches and wireframes later, the team designed a mid-fidelity prototype to be used for some quick preliminary usability testing. This round of mid-fi prototype was briefly shown to PMTs while designing to gather some initial thoughts on the flow. After which, the screens were enhanced into a hi-fidelity prototype ready for usability testing.
A usability test was conducted with 5 PMTs to determine if PMTs were able to navigate the HRMS site given the context that they have to apply for industry approved tests for their contract staff, and conduct appraisals for them in the near future. In summary, the overall task completion rate was 94%, and the overall System Usability Score (SUS) was 85.5%, both of which were good!
The main changes are below:
1. Add new staff
5/5 participants were concerned over the manual input required upon adding new staff to the system. THey were overwhelmed by the lengthy single page 'Add staff' form.
Changes: Since the team could not control the amount of information necessary to be input in the system, we decided to break down the form into parts to make it seemingly less overwhelming instead.
2. Scheduling appraisals page
5/5 participants incorrectly identified the ‘Conduct Appraisals’ quick action icon as an edit schedule icon. There was also confusion on how to get the calendar to pop up in the original design.
Changes: Streamlined the page to only show one action needed instead of providing too many options, and have the calendar stay throughout to stay consistent.
3. Card design
4/5 participants did not know where to click to request for ‘tests’ from the card. Some clicked on the pills first, and then the title of the card.
Changes: Added a CTA to ensure the affordance is clear enough to request for a test.
With this updated design, the team handed the design over to developers to build the platform. The project was slowed to a halt due to a delay in formalizing the project and building a project team around it however, but it may be picked up again in the near future.
