Work queue manager
User research | Design | Evaluation
Empowering service request fulfillment teams to prioritize and load balance their work
DURATION
July 2018 - February 2019
MY ROLE
Lead designer and user researcher
TEAM
• Product owners
• Business analyst
• Developers
CLIENT
Large, globally distributed IT organization
Highlights
• Employed user research to understand how teams were currently managing work, including their goals and scenarios. This research both informed the design of the first release, as well as laid the groundwork for possible future innovative enhancements to make teams more productive.
• Designed an intuitive application that addressed user needs while applying established design principles and interaction patterns.
• Evaluated the first release with users to understand how well it fulfilled user needs , including potential to replace manually intensive methods teams were employing to manage their work.
Problem
Teams using a global service request platform did not have the capabilities they needed to manage incoming work. Consequently, they resorted to other custom methods that were labor intensive to maintain, inefficient to use, and disconnected from the application where the work was received.
In this global service request platform, technology sales people submit requests to back office teams to help them fulfill the various steps within the sales transaction process, such as pricing, proposals, and contract registration. These teams needed to be able to manage their work so as to optimize their productivity. To do so, they were creating custom digital or physical murals (or even an application) that were outside of the platform where they performed their work. This meant that teams were expending a lot of manual effort to keep their individual murals up to date and to pull in team performance metrics. These views were not easy to manipulate and lacked consistency.
Project goals
• Create a new view that would allow the service request fulfillment teams to efficiently manage their work within the same platform where the work is received, eventually replacing their custom murals.
Challenges
• The initial requirements were quite prescriptive based on information gathered by a kaizen role prior to my involvement in the project. The methodology of how those requirements were gathered was not shared.
• The project team were not open to adjusting the initial requirements to take into account user research findings.
To comply with NDA, I have intentionally hidden and replaced content in this case study.
Process
Through user research, I gained an understanding of the important aspects of managing work within this context, identifying needs that the original requirements missed. I applied UI design principles and addressed interaction behavior details, while laying out a roadmap to evolve the tool into a fully effective experience for the target audience.
• Performed user research to validate the requirements and understand the user goals and tasks. This research revealed the need to elaborate upon the original envisioned solution.
• Assisted the team with refining the design for initial release, providing mockups with UI specification details.
• Tested the application as it was developed and also evaluated it with end users. That evaluation showed the need to evolve the tool further in future releases to address additional user needs.
• Created a user story map that integrated the original requirements with other users stories that could more fully address user needs over time. and allow users to migrate from their existing off-line, manually intensive solution.
Discovery
Through user research, I identified additional user needs that were not addressed by the original requirements, while gaining understanding of how users managed work within their teams.
User needs that I identified
I performed interviews with users where they could take me through how they manage their work and describe the relevant scenarios that occur, in order to better understand their goals and steps. This identified a set of user needs that went beyond what the project’s initial requirements were calling for.
Alerts
Events related to work requests, such as addition of a new comment or other information by the seller (requester) need to be noticed easily.
Work prioritization support
Users prioritize work requests based on the value of the associated sales deal, the type of request and input from the requester.
Awareness of stagnant requests
Requests that look difficult to fulfill may remain unassigned in the work queue. Such requests need to be highlighted to ensure they are not overlooked.
Visibility to team workload balance
Teams need to be able to understand the relative workload of their members so that they can spread the effort.
Real time automated updates
Having to manage the data in an offline mural necessitates extra work to manually copy data multiple times per day. This also opens up possibility for error in keeping this data in synch with the on-line service request platform.
Team and individual work views
The ability to switch between viewing team vs. individual work queues was needed depending on the situation in which the work was being viewed, ex. team meeting.
Analysis
In distilling the research findings, I did the following:
• Created an empathy map and an as-is scenario diagram.
• Documented user goals and compared them with the requirements that the team were providing me.
• Plotted requirements on a prioritization grid to help determine which of them should have focus.
Design
Driving from the knowledge that I gained from user research, I explored ways that the design could support the jobs that our users were performing as they triaged work requests, balanced work across their teams, tracked progress and strove towards team productivity goals.
Exploration
Early wireframes
I used wireframes to visualize early ideas. I did a competitive review of other Kanban style boards. Later, I created a user story map to show how the application could evolve to progressively support user needs.
Viewing order details
Teams wanted to have a view of how work was distributed across team members, as well as individual and team performance. Here I explored ideas for a composite view, including easy access to team goals and metrics.
Providing a flexible view of work
Here I considered what filter and sort options would allow teams to meet specific scenarios of use, for example prioritizing based on value of the sales deal being supported, or to constrain the view to a given request type that a team member is best qualified to support. I also included contextual functions to quickly assign requests or add reminder notes.
I applied knowledge gained from my user research and collaborated with the project team to iron out details of the design, while overcoming scope and technical constraints for first release.
Supporting key tasks
Filtering
Applying filter selections
As the team desired to have the data itself update only when the user explicitly chose to do so, this meant that the user’s selected and applied filter options could differ at any given moment. I provided a few different possible solutions for making this intuitive, including one where the ‘Filter’ button would not be enabled until the user made a filter selection, thereby to indicate to the user when unapplied filter selections existed. I also used tokens to keep the user visually informed as to the filter criteria that was currently applied.
Use of color
The team also wanted to apply color to the tokens. While I did not feel that this was optimal, (as color could be used for greater purpose elsewhere on the layout), I helped them with this as an interim solution, providing suggested color choices mapped to specific filters. I also suggested ordering tokens left to right in the same order as the filter controls. This was to provide a consistent mapping for the user to help them quickly understand their applied filter scheme.
Clearing and saving filter selections
‘Clear all filters’ and ‘Save filters’ actions were placed as transparent buttons at the end of the token string for affordance and to distinguish these important actions from other elements. ‘Save filters’ would save the current filter scheme as the default across user sessions, an important feature for users who often may want to focus on the same dataset, such as a team for which a certain type of request is of high priority.
Tracking and prioritizing work
Each card represented a work request that a squad member could be assigned to work on.
Included the most important content
Client for easy identification
Request type to indicate the type of work involved
Dates to help the request be completed in a timely manner
A small icon used to indicate a special type of request, called an ‘Accelerate’ request
Potential value of the associated sales deal to help prioritize requests.
Supported common actions
Within the card, there were links for specific actions, such as opening the requests’ detailed view, assigning the request to yourself (unassigned requests), marking the request as a favorite, or opening a contextual menu of other actions.
Used visual design in support of the task
I applied styles to the various elements to provide visual hierarchy, based on the importance to the task. I also aligned and balanced the position of elements in the card. All of this helps with making the information easy to scan. I advocated for keeping most of the UI color neutral so that color could be used purposefully to highlight important information, both now and in future releases, such as alerts to important events like an overdue work request.
Understanding incoming work from multiple angles
This view is situated within a larger global service request application. It fills a vital purpose by giving teams flexibility and power to assess and prioritize their work, based on the various scenarios in which they operate.
Provided easy navigation between team and personal views using tabs
Separate filter schemes could be saved for each tab. This supported various scenarios such as team discussions, a team member helping out a teammate where they need visibility to their work, or a team member managing their own work.
Allowed user to focus on a given pipeline
At the top of each pipeline, two icons represented actions to expand or collapse the pipelines themselves, providing more expansive views when users want to focus on requests that are in a given state, such as those waiting for actions by others.
Included sort options to support user goal attainment
Based on user research finding, I proposed an option to sort by updated date to help team managers notice when requests were not being attended to.
I provided design suggestions for the manual sort feature, including that we should add shortcut actions to move a a card to top or bottom of a pipeline, in addition to facilitating this through drag and drop.
Detailed design
Evaluation
I performed a user evaluation of the pilot implementation, including with respect to common user tasks such as identifying the highest priority request to work on next.
Usability evaluation of release one
The evaluation I did with users found that while the release one implementation has useful functionality, it was still limited in comparison to what users needed.
Findings
• Users need to know when tasks handed off to others for a given request are completed.
• The work tracker needs to convey the progress of a request and work remaining, such as through associated notes or other more structured mechanism.
• It could be useful to group requests according to specific roles within a support team to align with how teams divide up work.
• Similarly, users miss the ability to easily understand in one view, the distribution of work load across their team. This includes the need for a better way to visually map requests to their owner to understand individual work loads at a glance.
• Teams could benefit from building in additional logic to take into account information that would effectively indicate the relative importance of each request, including due date, value and work remaining to be completed.
• It would be helpful to have metrics within the work tracker such as the time requests remain unassigned, the age of a request and the time it takes to complete tasks handed off to others. This could provide benefit to team managers as well as members, and could help identify which team members need help.
Results
We provided a holistic view of work for the service request fulfillment teams to help them manage priorities, meet deadlines and identify roadblocks.
The design solution allowed users to:
• View key information about each work request, presented within status based pipelines, with the option to expose additional details
• Filter work by request type, business area, due date, team and assignee
• Save filter settings
• Sort the work by submitted date, due date, last updated date, assignee and value of the related potential sale
• Manually sort the work using drag-and-drop
• Expand/collapse pipelines
• Easily switch between individual and team views of the work
• Utilize shortcuts to assign work to yourself or mark as a favorite
• Navigate from the work tracker to the work task itself
This solution was arrived at within constraints that the team set. So, some of the needs that I identified in my research were not met. However, this initial solution can serve as a foundation upon which to build more comprehensive support in the future.
Recognition
2020 Stevie Award
Bronze Stevie Winner
Collaboration Solution - New Version.
Reflection
While successful, the project provided some good lessons that I take away to continue to improve my design process.
Identify new ways to enable user research
I have come away motivated to place even more priority on focusing teams on involving users early and often, and to find new ways to overcome barriers to doing so, including through persuasive examples and the early establishment of user experience metrics.
Educate on the role of user research in formulating requirements
The requirements need to take into account user needs from the start and they must be general enough to leave room for creative UI design to take place. They must also be malleable as more is learned based on iterative testing of ideas with users.
Balancing support for user needs with feasibility requires team collaboration
Accounting for implementation constraints while at the same time supporting both user needs and UI design principles is a balancing act the requires close collaboration and creative solutioning. Usability testing, including A/B testing, can objectively provide evidence of which solutions work best.
Acknowledgements
Product manager
Business analyst
Development manager
Francesca Zafferoni
Maria Joao Pereira
Miguel Batis