Enhancing employee management
Dec 2021 ~ Feb 2022
Context
Hubstaff is a remote company that created a workforce management software suite that offers proof of work, time-tracking software, and payroll management, along with a remote talent finder and project management software.
Members are a valuable part of their product, although it’s missing fields to give more details about employees and how to manage them.
Discovery
The CSD Matrix method was applied to get started, which can split three categories into Certainties, Suppositions, and Doubts to come up with relevant things to ask.
Based on those hypotheses, a few things to explore would be:
How do they manage their employees' info currently?
What are the pain points of their current tool/service?
How often do they use the Members area of Hubstaff?
Is it okay to start doing it one by one?
Talking to the users, it was possible to identify the following points respectively:
They use spreadsheets, PDFs, or other web services to manage employees.
It’s expensive, and they need to handle multiple sources.
Twice a week, they use the Hubstaff members area.
It’s OK to do it individually, but it would be nice if they could import multiple files.
Opportunity
Assuming they are spreadsheet and PDF users and have confirmed the frequent usage of the Members area, a good call would be to improve that section so it’s possible to be more flexible and become a single source of truth.
Benchmarks
Doing a quick market research, we can notice two big competitors in that segment: Monday and Qulture Rocks. So here are some impressions:
Monday.com
Admins can update members' info 👍
Avatar support 👍
Several personal fields 👍
UX is not so intuitive 👎
No attachments 👎
Qulture.rocks
It was impossible to test Qulture Rocks due to the delay on their side in sending out the demo. Although interviewing an active user and asking some questions, a few points could be noted:
Ability to plan 1-1s 👍
Good UX 👍
No sign up 👎
No payment management 👎
Goals
Based on the collected data, the objective is to build a profile area so the organization owners can edit the personal information of their employees and reuse it across the product.
Besides, it will be possible to centralize data only on Hubstaff, so there is no need to switch to other tools.
Prioritization
To understand the dos and don’ts and the relationship between the requests, a variation of the affinity diagram was applied, and they were grouped into four categories: System-related, Individual-related, Organization-related, and related.
Analyzing the results, the features were classified based on the matches and number of requests.
That was also an excellent guide to prioritize the scope and make the decision to break the roadmap by the following:
1st iteration: Employee personal info.
2nd iteration: Calendar to book meetings.
3rd iteration: Employee documents and files.
Ideation
The proposal is basically to provide a new branch under the Members area.
After logging in and reaching the Dashboard, users will keep the same flow by accessing the People > Members menu in the sidebar.
They will get two new clickable elements there: the members’ name and the dropdown action item called “edit profile.”
Under this component, viewing and editing member details, accessing their documents, and checking their calendar availability will be possible.
The UI proposed is an extended modal or off-canvas menu view, so there’s enough room to edit all personal fields like nicknames, birthdays, skills, and others without losing context and reusing existing components from the design system.
A tab switcher was also included to open the attached documents, such as contracts, criminal checks, and courses, or access the calendar to book meetings and 1-1s.
Design Decisions
Given the circumstances, the solution proposed is based on data collected, incremented, and tested.
The main objective was to transform Hubstaff into an all-in-one solution, so switching to other services and tools is unnecessary to accomplish the goal.
Next Steps
The hypothesis around the whole idea is that the users want to save time and reduce friction.
After releasing the feature and having the ability to analyze quantitative and qualitative data to understand user behavior, here are some possible improvements:
OCR documents so it can save time when filling existing fields in the docs.
Batch import documents from several users.
Import data from other sites, like the competitors, since Hubstaff has integrations
Export action so they can update existing files before uploading to Hubstaff and avoid conflicted data.