My role & team
Lead product designer
I collaborated with 3 engineers and the CEO. For the design system, I worked with a fellow designer.
Target audience
Small enterprises with 10-100 members. Thinking agencies and early-stage startups.
Problem
Most organisations use time-off trackers that are desktop only, which means you need to have your laptop handy, open it up, fire the tool on web and then apply to take the day off.
Now, picture this...
There’s a family medical emergency and you’re rushing to the ER. You need to skip work that day and have to let your team know. But you’re already at the ER when you realise this. You naturally don’t have your laptop with you, which means you resort to WhatsApp messages to inform your team of your unavailability.
Does it reach everyone it has to? Does it reach them on time? Do you remember to add it into the system later so that your days-off are calculated accurately? The answer in most cases is, “I’m not sure”.
The resultant anxiety and confusion for both you and your team is unnecessary and avoidable.
Opportunity
For the user:
Several time-off tracking use cases emerge from brevity and require quick, easy, on-the-go solutions. A lightweight mobile application is one, direct way to cater to these scenarios.
For the business:
Pause belongs to a red-ocean market with stiff competition. Being available on additional platforms that are relevant for users is a key differentiator.
Defining mobile features
The features on mobile are a subset of those available on desktop, which is expected since the largest use cases are still on prevalent on desktop.
Through research however, I identified core scenarios in which mobile could provide value for employees and team leads. I then distilled them down to the specific features I should build for on mobile.
User types & goals:
Team lead:
Employee:
Home view
Jobs to be done:
Design iteration for 'Home'
The original experience delivered to engineers focussed on shrinking desktop calendar into a weekly view, but following the same visual patterns and information hierarchy. A conversation with engineers changed this direction–
Since they were building the app in Flutter, it was far easier for them to develop an experience that was similar to Google Calendar’s scheduler view. Interestingly, this was one of the solutions explored a few week earlier, which meant that I had accounted for all necessary use cases.
Time-off application and approval flow
Application
This experience would satisfy one of the largest use cases for Pause on mobile. The goal was to keep the experience across desktop and mobile similar/the same to maintain familiarity and thus ease of use.
Approval
To make our tool employee first, I took a peculiar product decision where an employee application would auto-approve if a team hadn’t approved it by the first day of the time-off period. This not only enables employees to take their time-off without worry, but also prevents team leads from feeling the pressure to always be available on the platform to respond to applications.
Once again, there is a focus on clarity and information with features like conflicts so that team leads can plan work better.
Profile
Viewing ones allowances on-the-go and understanding the policy that dictates these balances is key to employees taking the time off they need, when they need it. Once again, there was a focus on clarity of communication and transparency.
Selecting members for ‘Home’ view
While most users would choose to view days-off for their core team (which means this list might not change very often), in agencies, project teams change frequently and so do the set of people they work with. For scenarios like this, users can customise their view with who they see days off for. The challenge for me as a designer was to keep the search experience very simple between teams and members and handle all use cases without causing confusion.
