Procare: Staff Management
Ux DesignProject
- Staff Management Tool
Roles
- UX Researcher
- UX Designer
Deliverables
- Customer Research
- LoFi Wireframes
- HiFi Wireframes
- Prototype
- Dev Handoff
Project Info
Challenge
By the end of 2021, Staff retention and satisfaction were at the forefront of Preschool Directors’ minds. This was a post-pandemic landscape and giving Teachers and Admin the right tools to feel confident about work gave Preschool Center Owners and Directors some peace of mind.
Solution
Find a way for directors to easily plan, share and edit their ever-changing weekly staff schedules. After doing customer interviews with Preschool center owners and directors, we were able to find what their major pain points were when it came to staff scheduling and how we might make their lives a little easier. The scheduler had to be flexible, easy to edit and most of all something they could work on in chunks of time. Something they could navigate away from and come back to.
Business Problem
All-in-One Solution
Scheduling is a core operational function, yet our product did not support it. Directors were forced to rely on external tools, creating friction in a workflow that occurs weekly and impacts staffing coverage, labor costs, and even impacts vital business operations such as licensing and compliance.
From a business perspective, this meant:
-
Lost opportunities to embed the product into daily operations, reducing overall stickiness
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Lower perceived product value compared to competitors
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Increased risk from human error and miscommunication
The absence of scheduling limited both customer satisfaction and long-term platform growth.
UX Process
Working as a tri-team
This project was challenging in the sense that it was the first time I worked on a net-new capability, and we had a month for discovery. My tri-team was comprised of a product manager, a lead developer and myself. I had to balance stakeholders, scope, feasibility, and the whims of our customers on a very fine line.
At first, it was easy to get carried away with our users at the sheer possibility of what this feature could entail. But I soon learned that moving too quickly with customers had repercussions for me as a designer. In the middle of this discovery, I realized that what I had designed was too large. All I was thinking about was the time for discovery, not delivery. While I had initial alignment on my tri-team, not all the stakeholders knew about the solution. It was a pretty brutal misstep, as I spent hours re-designing what I had to cut out. This was a very good lesson to learn early on in my career: always ensure alignment with every stakeholder and tri-team members before moving on.
I had thought that by getting designs done quickly, I would be taking initiative. I didn’t realize that by not taking a moment to align with stakeholders, I was ultimately creating more work for myself and my team. Understanding who the right stakeholders are at the kickoff of a project is also vital. Forgetting just one group or person could be costly.
Final Takeaways
Start simple.
My biggest takeaway from this staff management project is that it’s always best to start simple and then build on top in digestible layers. I had been far too idealistic starting out on this MVP. I knew there was a set duration for discovery but I naively didn’t think about the scope for delivery. I thought we could overcome such a challenge and shot for my vision of a complete staff scheduling tool.
Some learnings:
+ it’s important to have a vision for a feature but you can’t stop there. Then you must work backwards to whittle it down into a foundational MVP.
+ sometimes net-new features are trickier than smaller initiatives. With all the greenspace, it’s easy to get distracted.
+ defining scope with problem statements and aligning with stakeholders is not the only time to check in.
Future Improvements
Monitoring over Intuition
It would have been simple to iterate upon our MVP, there was so much cut out of the original scope that we could have easily continuously cranked out several sprints of work for developers. Though why get on the hamster wheel when you can monitor in production? Sure, we had some ideas. But we wouldn’t be certain until we got out of the four walls of our meeting room and asked customers what they needed next.
We started out with a matrix to document our hunches. Then we refined that intuition with actual data. What we found next was not surprising – most users wanted recurring shifts.
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