Mirus Works rostering software

The challenge

Design a product to take the hassle out of rostering staff with multiple awards while managing employee compliance, attendance and payroll.

After offering top of the line consulting services to the Aged Care sector, the client wanted to create a solution that would cater to the exact needs of their market.

With hundreds of employees per facility, how do you know which employee is available and compliant? You often don’t know.

With the added pressure from the recent Aged Care Royal Commission, it was an exciting challenge. We wanted employees to focus on what they do best; take great care of the ageing population of Australia.

Methodology

What started as a 14 weeks engagement turned into an exciting year-long project that saw my role move from leading the UI design to a broader product design role.

The team and I conducted user research, competitor analysis and user interviews. For the visual design direction, I first looked at the existing ecosystem of the apps the client already had in the market. It was agreed early on with stakeholders that this new product had to fit in within the brand image. It had to be recognised by the public as an extension to the services and products already in place. Another exciting challenge; the product had to serve as a driver to review the oldest products of that company.

Building on that, I researched the other products the business had (an ACFI Calculator app, a CRM and a Revenue Management platform). I interviewed technical people supporting the products and some prospective clients. Thanks to these interviews and desktop research, I got many insights into what this new Rostering platform needed to look and feel like to best represent the brand.

I presented the visual design direction not only for the rostering solution but also for the ecosystem of products the company had. It was very well received, and everyone agreed on using the work we were doing to drive the future visual updates of all their products. That’s how I started very early on building and keeping up to date a small Design System Manager.

I then put together a live style-guide in Sketch referencing primary colours, secondary colours, fonts, font-styles, iconography and a toolkit for our component library. I then applied the design direction to key screens, uploaded everything onto Zeplin and on-boarded the development team.

The insights from research told us that our users weren’t necessarily proficient with technology which drove many of the visual design decisions. Matching this requirement with the fact that a rostering system is a VERY complex system on its own was certainly challenging but also very interesting. I paid particular attention to contrasts & font size and used WACG guideline to validate my designs before testing them with users. We did user test-testing remotely using Invision clickable prototypes to gather qualitative and quantitative feedback. We asked open-ended questions and measured the time, and the number of interactions users were doing for a given scenario.

💡 Few other problems we had to overcome along the way:

• Roster complexity: Because of the number of shifts displayed over a specific roster period (generally a fortnight), our initial treatment of this screen got very busy. Picture a giant spreadsheet with information in every cell. I went back to the drawing board and started to establish rules to constrain these 'cells'. First, I restricted the number of lines the components were allowed to display at once and introduce a hover behaviour. I colour coded the 'important' events such as leave episodes and introduced very subtle iconography to help users digest all the information present on the screen. I also contrasted what's necessary to know with what's secondary. For example, if an employee is working at a different site to the one selected, the shift style is using a slightly dim look and feel. With these treatments, users can efficiently focus on what matters to them.

• Visibility of the workforce: With hundreds of employees clocking in and out 24/7, how do we display this information in a digestible and meaningful way? One of the sites we worked with was curious to know if we could use that view on TV size screens for everyone to see. After prototyping ideas with two business designers I was working with, we landed on something unique to the industry; A time-based attendance screen. At any given time, a facility can easily see who is working, who is supposed to be working but hasn't arrived and who is starting next. What would typically take hours is now available within seconds.

After successfully launching version 1, my role in the project broadened, and I started looking at all the new requirements from a product design perspective. For most of 2 years, I worked closely with the product owner and two business designers turning user feedback and business requirements into beautifully designed features. Once a change or a new feature was tested and ready for development, Jira was used to keep track of progress and answer most questions from the team.