Automating pesky tasks for employees
Kala Assistant for Kronos
At a Glance
Problem: Higher education institutions experience revenue loss and strains on supervisor and employee productivity due to outdated, confusing, and restricted time tracking systems. Mistakes are frequently made when tracking time and requesting vacations. With the naturally high turnover of student employees as new students start and graduating students finish their work on campus, there isn’t a lot of time to learn and get used to new time tracking software.
Solution: Kala Assistant helps employees maximize their productivity by allowing them to track their time, request vacations, and make adjustments to their timesheet in a familiar chat interface. Kala is easy to learn and flexible and using Kala helps to improve higher education institutions’ revenue, on-boarding processes, and productivity levels.
Context: graduate class project, working in a group with 2 other members
Role: scrum master, interviewed participants, affinity mapped data for persona, created persona, facilitated brainstorming and ideation sessions, sketched low fidelity prototype and linked screens in InVision, conducted usability study session, designed final Axure prototype, and most importantly star of the protocast ;-)
Time: 4 months
Lesson: Designing a chatbot is incredibly challenging, given the multitude of ways that a person may respond to it. Providing structure in the copy of the chatbot's messages as well as in the smart keyboard options helps guide users in knowing what they can say to successfully communicate with the chatbot.
PERSONAS // IDEATION // PROTOTYPING // INTERACTION DESIGN // MOBILE DESIGN // USABILITY TESTING
Our Process
Our team approached this project in a semi-agile manner. We didn’t have a daily standup meeting, but we did communicate via emails every two days about the updates of the project. Our sprint meetings were held every week. We began by creating a persona and synthesized key requirements. Then we brainstormed ideas and created a low fidelity prototype. We ran a quick-and-dirty usability study on our prototype and finally, we refined our concept and design based on feedback.
Persona
We conducted 4 interviews with hourly paid student employees at Bentley University and 1 interview with a student at the University of Florida. Based on the data we collected in the interviews, we created our persona, Tiffany Rebanks.
Key Requirements
Based on the characteristics of the problem and the needs of the user, we came up with seven key requirements for our solution.
- Automatically clock an employee in/out by utilizing tracking technology when an employee arrives at and leaves work.
- Enable employees to request time off or additional hours and receive the supervisor’s decisions on a mobile app.
- Provide overview of work time for an employee to review and confirm or adjust on a daily/ weekly basis.
- Notify an employee when it’s time to leave home in order to arrive on time for work through the mobile app.
- Record an employee’s activity/hours of work in a database system while the employee is working.
- Notify an employee of any break overtime through a mobile app and allow them to confirm or provide comments about breaks and unscheduled out-of-office work.
- The time-tracking device should be cost-efficient and easily deployed by big companies.
Idea Brainstorming
We had several brainstorming and braindrawing sessions to see what ideas we each had that could solve the problem.
Sketching, sketching, sketching
After sharing ideas through drawing, we each had three votes to select the ideas that we thought best served the user. Then we discussed which ideas to move forward and which to toss. At the end of the session, we had made the following decisions.
- Deleted sliding-out-drawer design for the menu to minimize the user clicks.
- Switched from the top wayfinder menu bar to the bottom tab bar, which allowed user easier to access each view because the bar would be closer to their fingers the way they held the phone.
- Instead of having the notification center, we adopted the bot concept, an intelligent personal assistant who can answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests. Consequently, the bot became the place for all conversation and messages and the central, most important engagement in the app. Another reason we adopted the bot concept was to reduce the key paths from a long series of popups for making adjustments and give the user a familiar interface. This decision enables a personal, conversational, and natural language experience for our persona.
- Decided to make the bot the primary landing page when user opens the app, as opposed to the Daily Summary Page, since the bot was so central to the experience.
- Deleted fingerprint authorization process when user logs in. By doing so, we removed the limit for all users other than iPhone users.
- Simplified menu buttons from 5 to 3 options, as we believed that less was more in this case.
- Made month and day view primary scheduling views and week view a secondary scheduling view, as opposed to having them in the same hierarchy.
Low Fidelity Prototype
Next came a low fidelity prototype. We sketched a paper prototype and linked the screens via InVision.
Usability Study
We tested the concept and design by conducting a usability study of our low fidelity prototype with two participants. We received important feedback that led us to do the following:
- Added week icon to month view, which enables user to go back and forth from month view to week view.
- Made all schedule views scroll up or down for future or past months, weeks, days (rather than side to side).
- Used full color for worked days, and outlined circle (empty middle) of the same color for days not worked/scheduled yet.
- Added total schedule work hours to each day in the week view.
- Added text to the bot’s response to help users discover the commands that they could send to the bot.
- Displayed the next payday information as both the date and the number of days until that date.
Final Design
Kala Assistant contains two components - a 3D hardware component and a digital graphical user interface.
3D Component: The product uses beacon technology that detects employees’ location to track when they arrive, when they leave, how many breaks they take and for how long. This technology is embedded on tags that can be attached to an ID card, water bottle, keychain or on another item that the user frequently carries.
Digital Component: The data collected from the 3D component is stored in an online portal, with access via a mobile app. The app offers relevant information tailored to the viewer (employer or employee). We built out key paths of the employee view of this portal.
Our protocast demonstrates the capabilities of the Kala Assistant.
And if you're curious, you can check out our Axure prototype of the final design.