Creating a seamless time tracking experience
AVA
Designing a seamless and integrated experience for freelancers and clients to manage and track time on a freelancer platform
Date
April 2022
Duration
1 month
Client location
Singapore/
India
Team size
5 Persons
My role
Team Lead
UX Research
User Interview
Journey Mapping
Overview
AVA is a platform helping entrepreneurs and small businesses hire freelance virtual assistants. They are aiming to develop an improved platform to integrate all aspects of the freelancer engagement process, from searching and hiring freelancers to managing and tracking time.
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The team came up with a design which integrated the time tracking function into the AVA platform, and reduced the number of key steps from 6 to 3.
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The solution
Client interface
Freelancer interface
The problem
The current user journey for time tracking is fragmented:
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Freelancers track their time using an online third party time-tracking tool.
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AVA manually retrieves the consolidated time-sheet and emails it to each client at the end of every month. This is not sustainable as AVA scales up.
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The goal
Design a seamless and integrated experience for freelancers and clients to track time and work done by freelancers on the AVA platform.
Understand
What are our research objectives?
We identified the two key user groups in this case: the freelancers and the clients, and established the following key research objectives for each user group:
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How important is time tracking to the user?
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How do users currently perform time-tracking, and what is currently (not) working in the current user journey?
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What time-tracking reports/information are useful for users? How are they being used?
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What is the user experience like on other freelancer and time tracking platforms?
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Competitive analysis
We started off by looking at the competitive space, as the information is easily available for us to identify potential opportunities for improvement. In addition, as one of AVA's requirements was to minimise the effort to meet the goal, we also wanted to find out what time tracking solutions are available in the market that can potentially be integrated onto AVA’s platform.
What did we learn?
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Not all freelancer platforms provide time tracker function. There is opportunity to integrate this into AVA's platform.
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Positioning the time tracker function on the landing page, and at the top of the page helps users navigate more easily.
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Options for users to easily switch between auto time tracking mode and manual mode.
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Allowing flexibility for users to adjust the resolution of the screenshots helps address confidentiality issues and meet specific user needs.
User Interview
As we wanted to understand more about how users currently go about doing time tracking and the pain points they face, we conducted a series of user interviews.
Overcoming the challenge in recruiting interviewees
While the team intended to interview current AVA freelancers and clients, we faced some difficulties in recruiting from AVA's current user pool, and decided to pivot our strategy and recruit interviewees from non-AVA users. We specifically recruited interviewees who had experience in time tracking and using other time tracking tools so that we could still gather useful insights from their experience and pain points in time tracking.
I led the recruitment of the interviewees and we interviewed a total of 5 freelancers and 5 clients:
Concept Test
Concept testing with wireframes to overcome time constraints
The team initially planned to synthesize our interview findings before ideating on designs and creating a prototype for usability testing. However, due to the earlier challenge faced in recruiting interviewees, we needed more time to recruit non-AVA users. As the team lead, I led the team to re-strategize and we decided to concurrently develop a low fidelity wireframe based on the research from the competitive analysis and stakeholder requirements, so that we could test it with the users during the user interview. This would allow us to get their feedback and observe how they interacted with it.
Freelancer interface
We kept the freelancer interface largely consistent with conventions and features of the time tracker platform that AVA freelancers are already familiar with.
Client interface
We focused on key information that is required by clients to verify work done by freelancers.
Synthesize
Affinity mapping
We categorized the feedback that we observed from the concept test.
Who are we designing for?
From the insights gathered from the user interviews, team developed user stories for the two key user groups, to help guide the team in our design, and help AVA better empatize with the users. ​
What is the user journey like?
Mapping out the freelancers and clients' time-tracking journey, we uncovered their pain-points and identified opportunities for improvement.
Prioritising our insights
What should we focus on?
As we were not able to address all the issues within the project timeline, we had to prioritise the focus areas. The team did a prioritisation exercise based on the following areas:
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Business impact
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Complexity to implement
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Expected usage
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User groups​
From our prioritisation exercise, we identified the following key areas to focus on:
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Integrate a time-tracking solution that is intuitive for clients to set up and for freelancers to use​
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Provide for clients to easily see consolidated view of each freelancer's time spent
Design
How did research influence design?
Based on the research insights, the team iterated and made improvements from the earlier lo-fi design for the following key areas.
Key area #1
User pain points from interview
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Time tracking is time consuming for clients and freelancers
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Insights from usability test
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Freelancers have difficulty finding the time tracker feature
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Recommendation
Time-tracking feature that is intuitive for users:
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Maintaining consistency with similar time-tracker solutions so that it’s easier for users to learn and remember how the interface works
Freelancer interface
Dashboard
INITAL DESIGN
AFTER ITERATION
Freelancer interface
Time tracker
INITAL DESIGN
AFTER ITERATION
.png){kind=tracking}
.png){kind=tracking}
After freelancer starts timer
Key area #2
User pain points from interview
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Time consuming for clients to go through freelancers' timesheets individually
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Need to deal with missing or inconsistent data from freelancers
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Insights from usability test
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Clients are overwhelmed and find the dashboard too cluttered
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Clients are unclear how to download timesheet report
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Recommendation
Provide a consolidated view for clients to easily view freelancers' time spent:
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Focus on information that is important to clients
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Provide for flexibility of use to cater to different client needs
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Maintaining consistency with similar time-tracker solutions so that it’s easier for users to learn and remember how the interface works
Client interface
Dashboard
INITAL DESIGN
AFTER ITERATION
Client interface
Timesheet reports
INITAL DESIGN
AFTER ITERATION
Deliver
How will the proposed design impact business?
1. Key steps in the time tracking user flow has been reduced from 6 to 3.
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Removes the need for AVA to manually extract reports for clients
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Clients can view timesheets at any time
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Removes the need for freelancers to log into a separate time tracking platform
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CURRENT
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2. More intuitive time tracking experience
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Reduce freelancers’ cognitive load and they can be more efficient at work ​
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Clients will be more satisfied and confident of engaging the freelancers’ services through AVA which helps builds trust in AVA’s brand
3. Providing a consolidated view for clients to easily view freelancers' time spent
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Helps clients verify work done and time spent more easily, enabling them to be more assured of making payment​
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AVA can receive payments more promptly
"It was very helpful. The team researched 2 new features we were looking to build for our product and were able to map out the exact flows that we could build"
Amar Bedi, CEO
AVA
Next steps
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Conduct preference test with current users to validate the new time tracking work flow
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​Conduct more rounds of usability test to further improve the design.
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What are my takeaways?
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Involve the client more in the design process, so that their inputs can be addressed earlier in the design process, so that they have more ownership over the final solution.
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Better scoping of the project. Due to the time constraints, the team had to undertake the design of the client and freelancer interfaces concurrently. If there was more time, I would work in phases and focus on the freelancer interface first before incorporating the design elements into the client interface.
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Interview more current users, so that we could get more insights on the pain points on the current user flow, and the designs can address them more specifically.
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