A date bar

Background

Retain is an Enterprise Resource Planning tool used by large organisations to maximise utilisation of their employees.

These organisations typically have over 100,000 employees. And that presents complex challenges to make sure the right people are put on projects for the right amount of time.

Retain helps such organisations to improve operational efficiency by letting them forecast resourcing needs, talent gaps, expenses, profits and plan for various scenarios of projects and resources.

Project Overview

Transform a legacy engineering-centered product into a user-centered product that suffered from many usability issues.

The product had low UX maturity, and I was on the team responsible for bringing user-centered design approaches to the product.

User research

The research team conducted a series of customer interviews to understand the workflow of our users and how Retain is used in their context.

The research revealed lots of interesting insights including the workarounds the users do to tailor Retain to meet their needs. Clearly, Retain was not precisely meeting the expectations of the users and had a very high learning curve.

With these insights into specific areas of Retain and its usage patterns, we were equiped to re-design Retain in accordance with the users expectations and reduce the learning curve.

Design workshops

With all the research data at hand, I led an ideation/design workshop with the design team and stakeholders from Retain. The workshop focused on generating ideas to meet the user needs.

The ideas were then prioritised and carried forward as design inspirations.

Now, the date bar

I've designed various modules on Retain, one of the most interesting and challening problem was to design an interaction for users to choose a date range in the planner grid.

The user need

As a Resource Manager, I want to optimise the utilisation of people I am responsible for, so that I can maximise the profitability of projects.

The user story

As a Resource Manager, I want to set a specific time period for the planner grid, so that I can see the jobs the resources are assigned to.

Ideation

Final design

I designed a simplified interaction similar to a scroll bar with drag handles and ability to zoom in and out of the grid.

Further to the mockups, I created a functional prototype in HTML, CSS and JS to test it with users.

Impact

• Retain is now a modern easy to use platform with much less learning curve
• Managers are now able to select precise time frames as it fits their need and hence increasing the productivity of people