BestWork
Global User Research / Product Strategy / V1 Product Definition / Design Systems / Enterprise Application
2020 - 2021
Context
R/GA is an international digital agency with about 2,000 employees. Creative teams collaborate globally to design brands, products, and digital services for top tier clients.
Since 2002, R/GA has built and maintained its own enterprise workforce management app (Reporter). This app is the engine that enables the business to operate globally and includes business-critical workflows like:
Hiring and HR
Resource Management (Allocations)
Timesheets and Time Off
Project Management
Business Intelligence and Reporting.
In 2019, I was asked to be the founding product designer for a new team to redesign and rebuild this 20 year old workforce management app.
Our team lacked the time and resources to redesign the entire app at once. I led a discovery phase that helped the team identify which feature would be best to focus on for an MVP that alleviated some of the R/GA’s most urgent pain points for users, the business, and the product.
The Challenge
Get a comprehensive understanding of R/GA’s existing relationship with the app.
Identify the most impactful feature to focus on redesign and rebuild for V1 of the new app.
Work with users and stakeholders to redesign, rebuild, and relaunch this feature.
Discovery
Immersive User Research
I began by leading a global design research effort to understand R/GA’s existing relationship with the app.
Leading a team of two designers, we spoke directly with over 20 users from around the globe (US, LATAM, EU, and APAC) and with representation from every core department at the agency at different levels of tenure and experience.
We focused our attention on the highest priority workflows to the business - those that impacted day-to-day project management.
Users interviewed from around the globe.
Comprehensive workflow map of the business-critical Project Planning process at R/GA.
Discovery Synthesis
With a clear view of the big picture, our team only had the resources to focus on one feature for the initial relaunch.
I led the team in a collaborative synthesis process that allowed us to make sense of our Discovery learnings and focus on the most critical and impactful pain points for the users, the business, and the health of the app itself.
Collecting and organizing Clues from user interviews
Grouping Clues into Themes
Dot-voting on early ideas with the entire product team
High fidelity sketches of ideas
Insight
The Allocations process was the most urgent pain point.
We zeroed in on Allocations (or Resource Management) as the most critical part of the process for both users, the business, and the app.
Allocations is the process of getting the right people on the right projects at the right time.
At R/GA, Talent Managers own this process and their goal is to ensure that everyone at the agency is well balanced with client work.
The Problem with Allocations
The old app (Reporter) was not serving Talent Managers’ needs.
The feature was:
Overwhelming and dense with data.
Inflexible, unresponsive, and slow.
Confusing with overlapping features.
Lacking in “humanity.”
User Need
Talent Managers were so frustrated that they were choosing to work in spreadsheets rather than in the app.
Business Need
With users choosing to work outside of the app, R/GA had no way of getting an accurate pulse of allocations data.
Opportunity
Restore confidence in a “source of truth” for Allocations.
If we could redesign and rebuild the Allocations feature to help Talent Managers feel confident in using the tool for input and iteration then Talent Managers would no longer need to use spreadsheets and R/GA could finally have an accurate source of truth for Allocations data.
Design Challenge
How do we design an experience that Talent Managers prefer
to use over their spreadsheets?
We observed Talent Managers using their spreadsheets and discussed what they preferred about the sheets over the app.
Ultimately the spreadsheets provided:
A way for users to more easily visualize project assignments.
A flexible and easily customizable view of different teams.
A simple way to view and navigate time without limitations.
Collaborative Design Exploration
Our team began exploring ways to visualize time assignments that would be more scannable for Talent Managers.
We also looked to keep some familiar frameworks from the old app and from the spreadsheets that Talent Managers relied on like a simple table structure with rows and columns.
Our design team worked closely with users and stakeholders throughout our design process. Power users were included early and often in our creative process validate design decisions along the way. Stakeholders were looped in for key milestones and important approvals.
Early wireframe explorations on how to illustrate allocations more visually
Refining our concept for visualizing allocations by person and by project
Exploring different visual directions while also refining the data visualization of allocations states
Summary of UI refinement for allocations states
Launch
Introducing BestWork Allocations!
A simpler, fast, more human experience.
Easier to scan.
A new data visualization language (inspired by the old app) plus some modern spacing makes it easier for Talent Managers to quickly spot the areas that need urgent attention.
Flexible, responsive, and customizable.
A new front-end tech stack allowed a more responsive interface enabling users to iterate within the tool itself - a major barrier for using the old app.
New features like Saved Filters and Custom Groups helped Talent Managers customize the workspace to meet their needs for any team they need to view.
A more human experience.
Small but impactful design decisions (like simply including employee photos) brought some humanity and warmth into the experience that previously felt cold and robotic.
Impact
User satisfaction scores increased across nearly all core product features!
Users were no longer relying on their external spreadsheets! They were iterating and working directly in the application ensuring that Talent Managers around the globe could get accurate allocations data whenever they needed to.
+14%
Average increase across all features.
+28%
Managing allocations over a long period of time.
+23%
Finding information about a specific employee.
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