PASSIVE TIME ENTRY

WHERE ouR JOURNEY BEGINS (project OVERVIEW)

The innovation team had a task to create a cross-product time entry experience for customers.

The purpose of this project is to discover innovative solutions that help customers with passive time entry and validate previously identified user problems.

Project Budget - $1m

Project Team - Lead UX Researcher (Me), 2 UX Designers, Innovation Team

Project Timeline – 4 weeks

WHAT WE WANTED TO DISCOVER (PROJECT GOALs)

We wanted to learn more about unidentified customers’ needs and problems, along our time entry journey. We also needed to validate the interactive wireframes with customers. These concepts represented potential solution options and it was important to confirm the assumptions with customers.

Goal 1: Validate that our proposed new capabilities for time entry solve our customer's problems

Goal 2: Discover unidentified customer needs along the time entry journey

Goal 3: Identify whether our proposed solutions meet the discovered customer problems along the time entry journey.

our plan for success (RESEARCH STRATEGY)

We would distribute the wireframe validation along the natural flow of discovery questions along the customer's journey. This would keep the validation process intuitive, and allow us to discover unidentified customer needs and problems.

This also gave us the flexibility to pivot in our feedback process, if our solutions didn't align with what customers were looking for.

our main CHALLENGEs

Prioritising the user. The team was set on using the wireframes created as confirmation for what users wanted, despite clear gaps in their gathering of user needs. My solution of a mixed-methods approach of validation of wireframes along phases in the time entry journey helped shift their perspective. It also allowed me to show the team how unidentified user needs could continue to emerge through the study.

Solutions were not created based on identified user needs. Stakeholders were very concerned that additional discovery would invalidate their solution options. I was able to show how discoveries could provide many options for innovation and create multi-level opportunities at varying levels of scope, time, and budget. 

HOW WE EXECUTED OUR STRATEGY (RESEARCH PROCESS)

The Facilitation Guide

It was important that the structure of our guide was flexible to allow for easy pivoting between discovery and validation. I phrased our discovery questions as open-ended questions guided by the phases of the time entry journey. We used screen sharing for users to give feedback on the interactive wireframes.

User Interviews

We interviewed 15 global participants, across different segments. All user interviews were 1:1, for 60 minutes, and recorded. After the interviews, I sorted, scored, and grouped the gathered user feedback. This allowed me to identify high-level themes, unique observations, and behavioural patterns in the data. We closed each session with a survey, focused on users’ need for new features. The survey had a Likert Scale scoring, and the data was then collated. 

Analysis

Using a rapid research template I created, I scored and grouped the user feedback into observations, and grouped themes. These observations were then ordered by frequency of occurrence and presented based on high-level need. I also created high-level emerging themes to help guide the team's direction for innovation, along the time entry journey.

Actionable Next Steps & Emerging Themes

I worked with the entire team to create actionable next steps for each of the themes and subsequent observations. This was to ensure that the recommendations were achievable within, scope, time, and effort for the team. I assigned team members to each group of actionable next steps, along with a difficulty score, to ensure an even spread of effort.

This collaboration process empowered the team to gain empathy for our users. It shifted their perspective to prioritise user needs in their innovation process. This process also allowed the team to feel included in the analysis and take accountability for the next steps.

Tools we used

Tools - User Interviews, Journey Mapping, Personas, Strategic Analysis, Lucid Chart, Qualtrics, Survey Analysis, Interactive wireframing, InVision, Sketch,

WHAT WE LEARNED (Discoveries)

Insight 1: Users felt unheard. All notifications relevant to their actions and needs were missing from the system. The current solution options were unhelpful since it did not fulfill any of their needs (starting, stopping, task switching).

Insight 2: Users preferred manual prompts to extend their time. The innovation option to automate time entries, based on scheduled calendar events, was unhelpful to users and at high risk for error.

Insight 3: Users commented that designs for floating timer feature we still unaware of user needs and weren't helpful.

Insight 4: Users loved the option to start timers through voice commands - and saw it as a large accessibility accommodation. Users raised privacy concerns around switching to a voice-only option to input time entry details.

Insight 5: Users loved the ability to retroactively fill in details on recorded time. They found this very helpful in solving a large customer problem of "lost time".

the impact we had

The team decided to integrate the concept into an existing dashboard product. The insights from this study caused the dashboard team to re-prioritise the entire roadmap for the dashboard product, around user needs.

The discoveries on predictive time caused the dashboard team to incorporate the entire concept into a future version of the dashboard experience.

The integration created an enhanced experience for existing and future customers of the platform. It also gave the product a large competitive edge in the market.

case study 1 case study 2 case study 3 case study 4