November 2022 - January 2023, Shipped Feature
Problem
Many managers in hourly work typically create schedules months in advance. They resort to tangibly submitting their preferred shift patterns, such as writing them on paper, which often gets lost. This makes it a muddy process for managers to create schedules that leave employees and the business dissatisfied.
Objective
The overall goal of this project is to create a net new feature that streamlines the scheduling process to alleviate any stress for our customers in health care or are mariners. This feature will allow for more visibility and autonomy over scheduling for both managers and employees. Shift Bidding grants schedules by seniority but gives those lower on the ladder a chance at their desired schedule as well.
Team
Product Designer
2 Product Managers
3 Software Engineers
1 QA Engineer
Project Context
Legion Technologies provides AI-driven workforce management solutions to optimize scheduling, time and attendance for businesses with large workforces. The product managers and I partnered together to create a net new feature to increase employee engagement and enhance productivity. I researched other platforms with features similar to shift bidding and began road mapping with my product partners.
Why Bidding?
A ‘bid’ refers to the employee’s shift selection. Usually, employees are not offering anything up like a typical bid - they are only selecting and ranking the different shifts they want to work.
Bidding gives employees greater visibility and clear understanding into the available shift patterns as well as a clearer result process. Legion provides a single platform where employees of various seniority can select and rank their desired shift patterns. This feature allows even lower-ranking employees the chance to secure satisfying shift patterns. Additionally, Legion offers flexibility, enabling customers to create customized rules for their bidding process, allowing them to choose different methods that best suit their business needs.
Research and Ideation
Because this would be a net new feature for Legion, I began my process with researching competitors and how they dealt with Shift Bidding. This helped me gain a better sense on what Shift Bidding is, what users look for, and the user flow. I read through the FRD for the goals and the features needed to hit, but it was important for me to get a better understanding of this new concept through the lens of a user. A few key points that I found important:
Location - for many businesses there are dynamic location groups where employees can work at various locations. The location of a shift pattern is important to the users decision-making and had to be higher in priority when displaying shift patterns.
Work Roles
Which days of the week are included in the shift patterns
I started my ideation process by mapping out the golden path—the ideal steps and interactions a user would take to achieve the product experience. Given that a significant majority of our users prefer the mobile platform over the web, I adopted a mobile-first approach. This would give me a good baseline on where to start when I began wireframing. I initially assumed this path would be the most ideal for users. However, once I started wireframing, I realized the simple path I had envisioned was more complex than expected.
Design Process
In my first exploration, it was clear that there was a lot of information and interactions that needed to fit in a clear concise design.
How was this design going to scale to customers with thousands of offers?
How can I make this process easier and digestible for team members?
How can Legion do more so team members can do less?
I started looking toward other mobile applications and observing interactions that could apply here. I began to see this feature as a mobile shopping experience: finding items I like, adding them to my cart, and then going to my cart to reassess which items are a priority and which are not. With this perspective, I broke it down from being an experience that handles everything on one page to being an experience that users can toggle in-between their ‘shopping’ for shift patterns and their ‘cart’.
As I kept exploring, my design improved. I used mobile-friendly features like horizontal scrolling to help the user view the entire shift pattern for a given week. I added filters so users can find what they need faster. Users can filter by the days of the week they want to work, locations, and specific work roles.
Final Mobile Interaction
Final Desktop Interaction
What Are The Rules Of Shift Bidding?
Control Center is only accessed by Admins of the company, meaning only a number of people have access to the controls. This allows admins of the company to configure the product to their business needs.
Because shift bidding is a large feature, I also designed its own template to help the user organize the rules around shift bidding. The shift bidding template includes:
When a bidding window will open?
When team members will be notified of their result?
When the new shift patterns will take effect?
Which work roles will be included?
And much more.
Conclusion
Today, this product is live with thousands of our mariner and health care customers using the tool for their day-to-day workplace scheduling. Managers are now able to create schedules in advance with ease, and team members can be confident to receive a schedule that they are satisfied with.
The process is much more streamlined without the loss of information or thrash on who gets which shift pattern. This feature respects seniority but does not neglect those who are lower on the ladder.
Overall, this feature has removed the headache of workplace scheduling for managers and employees, giving both parties more time to focus on what’s really important: their work.