Mabel Tan UX Research – Case Study Portfolio
Supahands: The Supahands Workplace is the project manager’s dashboard at Supahands, it had been running for a couple of years at this point, and we were looking to improve the UX for the project manager’s in their day-to-day workflow.
Mabel Tan UX Research – Case Study Portfolio
Research Goal: To understand the user experience of Project Manager’s and uncover areas for improvement or change.
Method:
• Contextual Inquiry • Log Analysis
For this evaluative study, we recruited 12 project manager (PM) participants for the contextual inquiry. Contextual inquiry is a collaborative process. For this project, it was feasible and inexpensive as the project managers participating were working in the office space and we were able to shadow them as they conducted their activities and tasks with little interruption to their daily routine. As the study progressed we would ask them questions in the
a moment or later when going over the observations together.
We were also able to conduct a log analysis of the log data recorded in the system. The platform is a type of project management system and in looking at the usage statistics we were able to map this across our information from the contextual inquiry to discover which features were imperative for the process.
Insights:
- Adding timesheets was the most time-consuming part of the project manager’s work flow. There was a system that relied on the input of users. However incorrect input was an issue and project managers were tracking separately via the output of the projects into excel sheets.
- Project managers tended to shop-around for SupaAgents based on their ratings but also, they would then often stick with the same people they preferred if they had proven to be consistent even though SupaAgents with equivalent ratings were available later on.
- Log data showed that some features that had been requested by project managers eg. notifications, were found to have limited to no usage, despite being highly requested in earlier builds.
- SOPs were incredibly important. However due to the project management process being varied across projects and across project managers – multiple SOPs had been created to mitigate this use case.
- There was a lot of time spent on transference work from ‘offline’ excel sheets to the ‘online’ workspace.
Conclusion:
We were able to identify key pain points of the project manager’s workflow. We proposed that the process had to be further simplified by making timesheets auto-record for each project – to achieve this the important next step would be to streamline and standardise project processes so that they may be automated. The automated timesheets would only be possible if there was a truly standardised Standard Operating Procedure. I and the product designer presented our findings to the team and the insights were used for subsequent projects. However, in the interim, we built a simple uploader feature that would not require manual input of the timesheets – this significantly reduced the time spent on transference work.