Role: Product designer
Responsibilities: Research, User Experience, Wire framing, Visual Design
Outcome
An Insights feature that allows remote teams to monitor their focused/unfocused time, as well as how much time is spent in collaboration with other teammates.
Problem Statement
Remote team leaders are trying to figure out if there are too many meetings, calls, etc interrupting their employees work. They want to know how much time is actually spent focused on core work.
Audience
Fully remote companies with 5-100 employees. Industries: Software, IT, e-commerce, call centers, etc.
Approach
User Research
I filtered a list of feedback/complaints given by employers and employees to determine what new features would be helpful in their new Insights section.
Looking at the comments, I determined that the feature needed to measure these things:
● Continual Focused time
● Continual Focused time
● Amount of time spent Unfocused
● Total Collaborative time with others
Market Research
I looked at two other programs for employee tracking and how they approached the problem of productivity. Part of the problem was showing how much time was spent unfocused but also how many times the employee shifted out of their focused state.
Exploration (Sketching & wire framing)
When looking at how to develop the insights feature I wanted to match the current UI while creating a clean and straightforward graphic for measuring focused time.
The following features were developed to monitor focused/unfocused/collaborative time on three levels (employee, team, organization):
● A widget detailing the top apps affecting focus
● A timeline showing the employee where in their day they switched focuses
● How often an employee's attention shifted from focused to unfocused
● A graph/pie chart detailing what percentage of the day has been focused/unfocused/collaborative
Delivery (visual and final design)
Throughout revisions I developed features starting from a single employee and expanding it to teams and then the entire organization.
The teams view gives you an overview of your team allowing you to see who's struggling with focus and who is currently excelling. You can also view what apps are affecting your whole team.
The organization view allows you to view teams as a whole and which teams could use some support.
Key takeaways
People want to see where their time is going and how much of it is being wasted. Providing a way to track how much time is unfocused as well as how many times their attention is shifted will allow them to target those problem areas.
Pinpointing what apps are affecting the focus the longest and most often is also a key resource for managers and employees.
Next steps
Next steps would be to further develop tools to see how much time is spent in meetings and collaborating.