Creative direction
Product design
Design lead
Overview
My role
- User experience design
- Visual design
- Creative Direction
- Prototyping
- Client presentation
- User testing data interpretation
Objective
To increase productivity, delivering work-life balance for service employees through powerful insights and self-serve solutions.
Solution
A mobile-first service employee experience, this product consolidates multiple previously used methods, to manage employee preferences and scheduling, into a single, efficient workflow. This streamlines scheduling, using techniques to increase data input quality. Accommodates employee preferences, by empowering employee’s with greater control and insights for balancing work and life commitments. In turn this approach also delivers accurate and timely employee scheduling data to managers.
The product prioritizes employee-centric advocacy, offering empathetic support for scheduling challenges, and delivers work-life balance insights that help employees make informed decisions about their shifts, boosting productivity and satisfaction.
Project Manager, CX Researcher & strategist, Lead designer (me), 3 designers.
What
I achieved
An internal initiative, the product objective was to enhance the employee experience while achieving accurate input data in a consolidated solution. As the project timeline was very tight, we worked in short monthly spurts for discovery, design, test and then reiteration based on findings. I was brought into the project as the lead designer after some mixed initial testing results.
Ease of use, efficiency and accuracy while delivering clean data for both employees and managers was a key objective and shaped the end result. The product combined preferences and scheduling, which were essentially linked, and in-turn served to achieve a consolidated experience for managers too. To get the project on track when I joined, I analyzed the work that had been done, plus the data from the first test round, and with some incremental changes, identified ways to effectively and efficiently achieve key objectives while ensuing a high quality of input data.
How I achieved it
Reset
Coming in to the project mid-flight, I immediately identified two methodologies to help us achieve better results:
- • USER FLOWS: I worked with the team to put together user flows, to help streamline the experience. We fleshed out two flows that achieved the objective. I presented these to the stakeholders, while giving clear rationale for why the “consolidated flow” would work best for ensuring higher quality data input by slowing the process and getting the user to make intentional, considered decisions.
- • WIREFRAMES: I got the team to work in wireframes first, this was a step that was missed first time around. I wanted the team to focus on functionality to achieve user needs and key business objectives, before focusing on visual design.
Discovery and experience
I crafted the mobile experience first, focusing on key user feedback at incremental points, so the user always was informed and confident in the process. I met with the team regularly to ensure we were on-track. When the mobile experience was solidified, the team moved to desktop. Uncovering learnings from each viewport, I consolidated these to get the best outcomes for the overall experience.
As this was a new internal facing project, we did not use the Starbucks consumer facing design system. We defined an experience that, while different, still adhered to the core Starbucks branding.
The Starbucks product team supplied some examples of designs they liked for inspiration and we conducted some research of our own. I set about putting a style guide in place, consulting with our Starbucks brand point of contact. When we had some key screens in the visual design, we presented them to the client to get confirmation before flowing the approach to the rest of the screens. Using styles and components, made the transition from wireframes to visual design very efficient.
Enhancing
Through the design phases, I compiled a list of assumptions which fed into our user testing rounds. Each round of testing required fewer enhances. With some addressable pain points after the final round of testing we got answers to key questions to make informed decisions and eliminate those pain points. With some enhancements, we delivered a user-centric product that the Starbucks Project Manager was very excited to share with his stakeholders. The results were impressive.
a task.
“This is absolutely amazing.”
“I’m a little flushed and kind of hot and bothered over it in fact, I mean this is really really fantastic work. I think this is such a game changer for both our hourly partners and for our store managers and the quality, the progress, the thought that’s gone into this to date. I’m just blown away by it. This is the best meeting in the day for me.”
Micke Ochs – VP Partner Centric Scheduling, Starbucks