My Schedules app

Fourth  |  B2B SaaS  |   Late 2016 - Mid 2018

Overview

My Schedules is a schedule management and shift swapping app for restaurant workers. It enables them to receive their shift patterns via their mobile phones and also manage their availability amongst other features.

I worked on this project during my tenure as Lead UX designer at Fourth Hospitality between 2016 - 2018 and lead the project from discovery to launch. This app and its functionality were a vital capability Fourth's to give them a competitive edge in the US market which they were now targetting.

Business context

Fourth are a B2B Saas enterprise company that has served the hospitality industry for nearly 20 years. Their clients include some of the well-known casual dining chains and pub companies in the UK and around the world; Their clients include YoSushi!, Wagamama, Itsu, Pizza Express, Prezzo, and Fuller’s, to name but a few.

Their solutions cover the two main aspects of running a bar, restaurant, or hotel; workforce management and stock & inventory.

Workforce management solution area

Over time, Fourth had built and acquired a suite of systems and applications that covered the full lifecycle of an employee and all of the tools required to manage them.

Their solutions covered staff onboarding and HR to sales forecasting and schedule automation for managers. On the employee side, there were social platforms, annual leave booking tools, with schedule management being the missing piece.

The MVP objective

Fourth had received significant investment to penetrate the American market with its full suite of applications. Fourth’s main rivals in the American markets already possessed mobile scheduling and shift swapping functionality, but the ace Fourth possessed was in the intelligence of managers’ predictive scheduling tool.

• Deliver an application with mobile scheduling and shift swapping capability for employees to give parity with rivals in the US.

• Integrate with the Labour Productivity application for seamless up-to-the-minute view of the live rota, giving Fourth the competitive advantage.
  

Competitor research

Fourth remains the market leader for Saas enterprise products in the hospitality industry in EMEA with a full end-to-end suite of products for Staff/HR and Inventory with an analytics overlay.

However, there are several competitor products on the market with more focused solutions that were starting to make waves in the industry. The biggest competitor for Fourth in the US/UK market is HotSchedules in the Workforce Management solution space.

Our users

As is common in most of Fourth’s applications the main two users of interest are managers steering the ship and the bar or waiting staff running the floor.

Being a B2B company it took a while for us to gain access directly to our users but over the course of the project we had lots of opportunities to interview these key users and test the product.

Qualitative User Research

Workshop: Hospitality management journey mapping

We ran a series of workshops as a parallel project to the My Schedules app project to deeper domain knowledge on the daily routines of hospitality managers.

What we did:

• Hospitality Consultant interviewed 12 managers across bars, restaurants, and hotels across London and the North of England such as;

  • Bar Zedel

  • London Cocktail Club

  • Oxo Tower Restaurant

  • Fullers Pubs

  • Intercontinental Hotel

• Captured the hourly and weekly tasks and processes of managers.

• Held a 3-part workshop where we;

  • Deep dived into the insights and discussed it

  • Mapped the data & themed what we had seen

  • Produced a journey map for 3 different personas

Themes from user research

Swap shift scenarios
It is common for employees in restaurants to swap shifts last minute if they have 2nd jobs, have children to care for or need to go to last minute auditions

Skill level matters
A big factor in managers approving swaps is the skill/experience level of the two employees

Perceived fears
There was a perceived fear that the app would remove manager & employee communication, and that individuals may abuse the ‘drop shift’ functionality causing problems for the manager

Quantitative Insights

Fourth’s core system that would drive the MySchedules app is called Labour Productivity. It is primarily a scheduling tool for hospitality managers to create and publish rotas. Secondly, it allows regional managers to see an overview of performance at their sites and track costs.

What makes the product unique is its advanced sales forecasting algorithm. The algorithm gives managers an accurate breakdown of the number of staff needed at each trading hour of the day to meet their forecasted sales.

Key insights

I obtained data obtained from Google Analytics and the application database with the help of the engineering team.

• Peak times of access: 8 - 10am - Mondays
  We corroborated through research that managers are in a high focus state and this is their ‘quiet time’.

• Time on task: 2 - 5 hours
  Scheduling is a high intensity, high focus and of critical importance to our users.

• Device split: 10 - 15% Mobile
  We corroborated through research that managers are in a high focus state and this is their ‘quiet time’.

• Employees per restaurant: 20 - 80 Per Site
  The bigger the site the more role types and the more complex schedule process becomes.

• Managers to regional managers: 10 to 1 ratio
  Regional managers must review a schedule before it can be approved.

Ideation & Inspiration

I ran a short creative workshop with the UX team to gather ideas for the interaction design of the My Schedules app. We split off to individually gather inspiration then regrouped to discuss our thinking and approach.

We combined inspiration from travel apps and calendar apps. We then broke out again to do some rounds of quick sketching. After discussing what we’d come up with, I worked up a more hi-fi concept combining the best of the ideas.

Wireframes and stakeholder reviews

I ran weekly project check-ins with internal stakeholders to review the user flows and UX design as it developed.

I find this is often where the bulk of the effort is for a UX designer, orchestrating design reviews, managing stakeholder expectations, challenging biases, and validating assumptions.

User Testing

With a very tight runway to deliver the application, it was critical to test early and often through the design process. I used a mix of informal user testing with colleagues and more formal usability testing in conditions similar to a lab.

I invited internal stakeholders as participants and the product team as observers - this was a great way for them to feel involved in the design process. These sessions resulted in positive outcomes for improving products at Fourth beyond just the MySchedules app.

Visual Design

As a design team we faced many technical challenges at Fourth. There were 11 engineering teams, 6 of which were front-end focused but some teams used Angular.js and others used Ember.js.

To reach a point of consistency we followed Google Material Design guidelines when creating new mobile UI’s. Because of the widespread popularity of the framework, there were supporting libraries in most of the languages we used at Fourth. We introduced some custom elements for specific use cases as needed.

The visual design assets were handed off to developers via Zeplin. I would then join the sprint demo’s to ensure that to ensure the design was implemented correctly and perform ‘Design QA’ where necessary.

Measuring usability

I decided to use the Beta Programme as an opportunity to collect usability metrics on MySchedules. The app would be used by employees at Pizza Express and Carluccio’s and roughly 50 users in total.

The tactic was to utilise an on-boarding screen when the app was launched and provide a link to a SUS questionnaire in Google forms. It was a late call to include the survey and it was deployed in the last 4 days of the 3 week beta.

Unfortunately there were only a handful of replies to the survey 6 out of 50 responded, a rate of 18%.

The System Usability Score was 64 - ‘OK‘ score for the first MVP iteration - we felt this was a good result, but clearly with much more room for improvement.

The low response rate could have been down to several factors;

• Schedule publish date - an assumption to test would be that employees use the app less towards the end of a rota cycle

• A more direct in app or notifcation driven method may have been a better solution

Summary

Customer feedback

• Overall managers and employees enjoyed the app and could really see the value of the application. Employees particularly liked the ability to block out when they were unavailable.

• The app was initially plagued by technical issues and performance woes. A symptom of some creaking legacy infrastructure which would be addressed before launch.

• One ongoing challenge was the cultural shift for employees to move from social platforms like WhatsApp of Facebook where they were used to arranging shift swaps and availability.

• Some clients admitted they would only use the basic functionality of receiving shifts and setting availability before using advanced features like swapping or dropping shifts.

What happened next…

• My Schedules was successfully rolled out to Wagamama US with a pilot in the UK too.

• Fourth later acquired their rival ‘Hot Schedules’ in the US.