Background
Imagine you are hired by a new startup called Thyme. Thyme’s goal is to be the new premier time tracking and payroll app. Thyme allows employers to keep track of hours worked by employees, their paid time off requests and distribute pay stubs. You have been hired to create an app with great usability and striking beauty. Surpassing previous User Experience and Design benchmarks set by well known web and mobile apps like Mint.com, MailChimp, Basecamp, Path, and so on.
Thyme allows employees to:
● Clock in and out.
● View their Timecard.
● View their additional earnings (bonuses, per diem, travel compensation, etc).
● View their time off requests and their status (waiting to be approved, approved, denied).
● Users can decide if they want to opt in or out of emails to be notified when the status
updates.
● View their weekly schedule.
● View their pay stubs.
● Make a time off request (Paid Time Off, Unpaid Time Off, Time off for Bereavement).
● View Thyme’s Legal Notice, Terms of Service, and Privacy Policy.
● Logout.
● View help pages.
Assignment
Your assignment has two parts: A. and B. Please don’t spend more than 4-6 hours total, we will consider your limited time when evaluating your work.
Use the included Personas as tools to help you better design your workflow. The only workflow you need to design is the below steps for Barbara, however, consider the included personas and how they will affect your design. Also, consider other scenarios and how they will affect your design. For example in one scenario a user may reconsider in the middle of his two day off request and decide to make it a single day off request. Deleting say a Monday time off request but leaving Friday before submitting the request for review. This means your design should have some way of deleting part of a Time Off request before clicking the submit request for review action.
A. Design the following workflow for the persona named Barbara. Please design this workflow to be usable and intuitive. (These can be pencil or pen drawn wire frames, or you can use a program like Balsamiq).
Barbara logs into the Thyme web app.
Barbara Clicks on the “Request Time Off” Menu Item
Barbara submits a Paid Time Off request for Wednesday, November 27, 2013 and Friday, November 29, 2013. Thursday is a Holiday and Barbra does not need to request it as time off. Barbara’s normal work day starts at 8am and she has an hour lunch at noon. She requests 8 hours of Paid Time Off for each day. She writes the description for the time off as “Taking a long Thanksgiving break”. She adds a note for the time off: “If there is an emergency, please call me at my Mom’s house if you can’t reach me by cell. Her house number is (805) 555-3735.” This request is placed in her waiting for approval area
Persona
Barbara Ruiz
Occupation: Legal nurse consultant Employer: The Canal Law Firm
47 year old Barbara previously worked as as a critical-care nurse in Boston. Five years ago she decided to pursue a career in Legal Nurse Consulting after often feeling underappreciated and overworked at her critical-care nursing job.
Barbara works hard and is detail oriented. She strives to feel in control and often says “the quality of the work I submit tends to be of a much higher standard than the work of my colleagues submit”. She spends many hours researching case histories and writing up her reports in Google Docs. “I like google docs, It’s simple and doesn’t complicate things. I can focus on my writing instead of learning how to use it. Microsoft Word has too many options.”
Last year Barbara requested time off for Thanksgiving, however, her paper time off request was
lost by her boss and never approved. As a result she was scheduled for court the day before Thanksgiving and had to take a red eye flight to make it to her Mom’s house by Thanksgiving day.
Barbara earns 6.17 hours of Paid Time Off every 2 weeks, these hours accrual and she can see the current total she has earned on her pay stubs, however, planning longer vacations such as her yearly cruise trip coming up in 7 months gives her anxiety. If she hasn’t earned enough hours of Paid Time Off by then she won’t be able to go. Upcoming shorter vacations may eat up too many of her hours. She decided to make a spreadsheet that computes how many hours she
has accrued at the end of every two weeks and deducts the number of hours of Paid Time Off she plans to take over the year on her smaller vacations.
Barbara’s Goals
● Focus on work and not learning a new piece of software.
● Trust that her time off requests are being properly processed
● Barbara wants to be able to easily know how much Paid Time Off she will have in the future
--- App Map View ---
--- Beautiful Color Mocks ---
--- Intelligent Wireframes ---
Thyme landing page allows users to log in thru email, which is later used for email notifications. This also restricts anyone that isn't employed by the select companies to sign up as a new user.
The left handed fly out navigation creates a consistent accessibility to any section of the app. It also personalizes the app and establishes the flat UI.
The timer utilizes the engaging circular graph and is based on an eight hour work day, changing color when the user works overtime. The drop down menu gives the user an accessible list of projects and opportunity to add a new project.
Time Off - Approved tab gives an easy view of approved time off requests signified by color and title.
Time Off - Pending tab gives an easy view of submitted requests separated by elegant titles that define when they were submitted.
Time Off - Create tab allows the user to select Vacation, Flex or PTO from the drop down then select the date range. They would also be required to enter the number of hours for half or partial days.
The green notification informs the user that any corporate holidays or weekends that vacations overlap will not be included in their vacation. The '+' button allows user to log multiple non-consistent days into one vacation.
The Summary - Pay History tab gives the user a macro view of their pay history as well as the ability to view their pay stub by tapping on the arrow.
The Summary - Vacation tab gives the user insight into the number of vacation hours they can earn, the number the used and how many they've accrued including the rate they accrue them. The list is broken into pending and approved sections.
The Summary - Breakdown tab gives that high level view of the user's time spend by week, month or year to date. The bar chart also gives an easy way to compare their time blocks. Tapping on a project will give the specific hours signified within the circle graph.
The Calendar - Week tab gives a view of the user's week and clearly shows that they have not been charged a vacation day on a corporate holiday. The color will also signify the status of their request.
The Calendar - Day tab gives the user a breakdown of their day and allows them to see what projects they worked on in that particular day.
