The Problem

When I was first assigned to the Supervisor View Feature, the team did not have much requirements to go by. Here is what we did know: Supervisors needed a feature that would allow them to have a holistic view of their employees workload. Our clients were struggling to improve their AR productivity, they had trouble decreasing A/R balances. In order to really understand what we were building, we needed to talk to our users.

Client Sites: Participatory Design Session

I started by visiting client sites to do contextual inquiry on supervisors and also their employees. Even though this feature was for supervisors, I wanted to take a holistic approach and understand the day to day users workflow as well. I also conducted participatory design sessions with Supervisors from both the back office and front office departments.

User Personas

I created a primary user persona and secondary persona based off of my qualitative research.

Information Architecture

 I reduced the possibility of usability and navigation problems by creating an Information Architecture. This really helped us stay organized as a team . We connected the content in a matter that matched the Supervisors needs and expectations.

Analysis

I spent some time reviewing comments and feedback from our users in the client sites. As a first phase we were going to tackle the following for this supervisor view:

1. The ability of a Supervisor to have the following control over their users worklists

2. Manage assignment of worklists to users

3. View a worklist summary and detail by user and across users

Wireframes

I went through many iterations and tested with clients to understand where the pain points were. By doing this, we avoided wasting our developers time and efforts.

High Fidelity UI

Below is the final design of the Supervisor View.

Results

After the first phase of the feature was released to our clients, we received a tremendous amount of positive feedback.

Future Vision a Supervisor Dashboard

After giving the final deliverables to the application team, I went back and looked more closely into the data gathered from the client sites. We were just laying down the base in the supervisor view feature, but there was so much more that our users needed in order to be as productive, efficient and successful as possible. 

Supervisors wanted more high-level information. Data that they could easily understand and take an immediate action. That is why the future vision includes graphs. Users also want more visibility on who is transferring work items, so I mocked up a transfer inbox, and lastly came up with a slick way of tracking employees "work effort" without having to rethink the whole infrastructure that has been in place for over a decade. This allowed us to prioritize a feature like Supervisors tracking their workers "work effort" sooner rather than later. 

I was able to get most of these items prioritized into the application team's backlog, it wouldn't have been possible without doing the user research, analysis and having the time to iterate.