Case Study - Planner
Overview
Project Background
Company Overview
Jetpack Workflow is a SaaS B2B company that specializes in task management and workflow software for accountants.
This new feature is a workload planner, and provides the tools and necessary information managers need when making a balanced work plan for their staff. It is also the start of a new paid plan tier in Jetpack Workflow.
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Customer research and churn data revealed that there is a set of users whose needs we don’t meet. Jetpack Workflow was developed with the intention of helping small accounting firms ditch their spreadsheets and get their work organized. However, once they are organized and their teams start to grow, they start to have a different set of needs that our software did not address. Essentially, they outgrow us. We want to develop features that serve these more mature teams, and so the buyer persona of Manage My Team Maria was born along with a new paid tier of Jetpack Workflow. Plan was the first feature developed as part of our new Scale paid plan.
*Note: Our research uncovered two primary problems that Maria faced regularly - she has a hard time managing her growing team in Jetpack Workflow, and she has trouble providing a good and seamless experience for her own clients. We elected to tackle the ‘managing’ problem first as it was an area with which we as a company were more familiar, and attempting to address Maria’s clients’ experience would mean designing for a user one additional step removed from our software. We tabled the client experience problem to hopefully return to at a later date.
Problem Statement
Our research determined that this customer type has a number of problems that could not previously be solved within Jetpack Workflow. In fact, many of these customers were using data collected and exported from within Jetpack Workflow but explored using means outside of the application. In particular, planning out work for their team was an area where these customers tended to turn to other solutions before returning to Jetpack Workflow to actually do their work. This gap in workflow puts the onus on our customers to manage this part of their process, resulting in extra mental labor for them as well as crucial productive time spent outside of the Jetpack Workflow application that we wanted to capture.
A good plan can make all the difference in having a productive week, and a bad plan makes it more difficult to achieve a good result. “Garbage in, garbage out”, as it were. Without visibility into their staff workloads, managers were struggling to ensure that work was being distributed in a balanced and efficient way, the most important items were difficult to prioritize, and blockages and bottlenecks often flew under the radar.
Additionally, this feature was the start of a new higher paid tier of Jetpack Workflow. We wanted to attract bigger companies as part of our business expansion goals and this was a primary need that we identified for managers of those companies. Essentially, as this feature was the first offering in this new level of our business we had to ensure that what we made was worth the extra money.
Our customers needed a way to reduce risk in the planning stage of their workflow. Our goals for this project are more control and peace of mind for our users, and more jobs and tasks completed on time.
Audience
‘Manage My Team Maria’ was our primary user target for this project. She is an owner of a business made up of around 3-8 employees. Her primary challenges tend to be related to managing her team and interfacing with clients.
Role
As the sole designer on the project, I played a central role in:
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User research
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User Experience
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Visual Design
Scope & Constraints
The end result needed to be able to be developed by our engineering team within a 6-week timeframe to keep to our release schedule. (Note: in the end, this feature ended up being quite popular among a subset of our users. We later dedicated an additional 6-week engineering cycle to add some of the nice-to-have features that were originally cut from scope due to capacity concerns after gathering feedback and requests from our users from the initial release.)
I also had to be mindful of certain technical limitations. I had to ensure that the designed system would not be too expensive in terms of the amount of data necessary to fetch. While there is plenty of useful data to work with stored within Jetpack Workflow, fetching and displaying it has proved challenging in the past with issues arising such as prohibitively long page load times. This was something to be mindful of when designing this system.
This feature needed to enhance and compliment the features in the preexisting cheaper tier of Jetpack Workflow, and it needed to be justifiable as a more expensive product.
Process
Note: some additional background for how Jetpack Workflow is set up - Jobs are projects that are made up of a set of Tasks. Tasks include a due date, an assignee, budgeted time, and often additional supporting information. Tasks tend to be more volatile than Jobs, and are where the majority of planning changes would need to be addressed. For our initial version of this feature we limited our focus to providing an interface where Maria could easily view and manage Tasks for her staff. For our second release we expanded the interface to include Jobs for additional context and a birds eye view of her company as a whole.
Pain Point Identification
When making a plan for her staff for the week, what does Maria need to know? Some key information includes:
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The availability or capacity of themselves and staff. Who has too much on their plate? Who has room for more? We need a way for Maria to measure business at a glance.
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What their team is currently assigned. What is everyone working on? What’s already distributed? We need a way to view individuals and their assignments
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Overdue work. What didn’t get done last week? We need to include last week's incomplete work and take it into consideration when making this week's plan.
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Unassigned work. Did anything fall through the cracks? Is there any work in need of ownership? We need to include tasks without assignees on this page so everything can be distributed properly.
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Work in danger of being overdue. How can we help Maria be proactive with preventing issues before they arise? We need to provide enough contextual information so Maria can identify work unlikely to get finished this week so it can be addressed.
When addressing any of the above, what actions would Maria need to take? Key actions to solve these problems include:
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Changing due dates.
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Changing the assignee.
Competitive Analysis
I selected some direct and indirect competitors to survey for this project. The focus of this analysis was two-fold; we intended to glean some information about similar features that seemed to solve the same problem we were attempting to, as well as learn more about paid plan tiers and what tended to be included in their next paid tiers.
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I surveyed three companies that I considered to be direct competitors, companies that appeared to use similar strategies to solve the same problems we do. I also included three indirect competitors, companies that appeared to use similar strategies in a different space than us.
From this analysis we found numerous examples from both our direct and indirect competitors including a birds-eye planning view of some sort, which we took as confirmation that we were on the right track in terms of addressing our users’ needs.
Full Competitive Analysis can be found here.
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Define New Workflow
I mapped out the following expected user workflow to define all actions this feature would need to account for.
Now that we understand Maria’s needs, we can define the process by which she would address problems as they came up with her staffs’ schedules.
When making a plan:
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Address overbooked - Reassign tasks from staff members who have too much to do this week.
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Address unassigned - Ensure all work is accounted for, assign staff members to any tasks without assignees.
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Address underbooked - Bring tasks due next week into this week for users who have too little to do.
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Defer - For any tasks unlikely to get done this week, defer and find a place for them in next week’s Plan
Knowing this, we start to get a clearer picture of what must be included and questions to answer moving forward.
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What does it mean for someone to be overbooked? What does that look like? How do we know who is overbooked?
With this tool, Maria has the ability to compare her employees’ workloads against each other to ensure everyone is working at an appropriate capacity. By surfacing the number of tasks that each user is assigned, Maria would be able to get an overview of how busy each of her employees is and make adjustments accordingly.
This is also instead of using “budgeted time”, which is another data field attached to tasks. While using budgeted time would provide a more literal view into how many hours of work each employee is assigned, many of our users use their own time tracking software outside of the time tracking option we provide in Jetpack Workflow and so often leave that field blank. By using number of assigned tasks we ensured that this feature would be useful for everyone.
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How do we reassign or defer tasks?
Both of these actions are currently possible elsewhere in the application using standard dropdowns and text fields. For this interface, we needed a solution that would allow for speedy editing without losing context of the pace, and while fighting for limited screen space. I designed this page to allow for easy task editing by dragging and dropping to make changes and to prevent speed bumps in the form of extra clicking and typing.
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What information does Maria need to make decisions at each step?
At a minimum, Maria would need the following in order to create good informed decisions about her weekly plan:
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The ability to understand her staff’s workload to compare against each other
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Access to any tasks without an assignee to ensure they get addressed
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Easy access to multiple weeks worth of assignments for each user, spanning from any currently overdue tasks they may have to two weeks into the future to provide.
Design Iterations
Initial Sketches
Iteration 1
Iteration 2
this feature ended up being quite popular with a subset of our users. While they were able to accomplish what they needed to with the version in the first release, we used our initial research and feedback gathered to enhance the Planner and help smooth out any remaining speed bumps in this part of their workflow.
Enhancements included:
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Expanding the interface to include a view for Jobs. This allows Maria context and control over entire jobs rather than just the pieces that make them up.
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Additional information in the form of budgeted time counts. As previously stated, though useful and more accurate in terms of hourly workload this was cut from the original scope due to concerns of it being universally useful. We added it for this release to provide those that do use it with the benefit of information it provides, as well as in the hope that by making our budgeted time feature more useful within Jetpack we could encourage its adoption among those that don’t currently bother with it.
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The ability to directly click through to jobs, tasks, and clients from the Plan itself. This was cut from the original scope due to capacity concerns. Adding it here allows our users to reach additional information on these pages with a single click instead of navigating the long way round.
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The ability to drag and drop multiple jobs and tasks at once. While the original version allowed for speedy editing by dragging and dropping, due to capacity concerns we were limited to allowing edits on one task at a time. This update allows Maria to make edits to whole batches of jobs and tasks at the same time, saving time in the form of additional clicks and scrolling.
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Visual design update to improve page hierarchy to make more visual sense and allow more horizontal space for the listed jobs and tasks and the key information they include for easier readability.
Six months out of our second release, 6.3% of our customers (companies, not total seats) are using the Plan on our Scale tier, amounting to 8.3% of our total current revenue. Given that the feature is relatively new, no longer promoted due to our company shift in focus to developing a rebooted product, and the fact that the tier has been given no additional support in the form of updates or new features, we regard this as a win.