The elegance of a simple solution — User research for requesting days off at work

User research, the power behind human-centred design

Through conducting 7 interviews and 7 diary studies I discovered that:

• Manual tasks like requests are experienced as dreadful by 90%.
• 60% is annoyed that work locations aren’t requested on time.
• All admins are frustrated about Xaler not being connected to their administrative systems.
• 100% forgets to request their work location from now and then.
• There hasn’t been a single time that a holiday request had to be rejected, due to expertise shortage.

“Why do I have to request the same work locations every week when I have a fixed days at the office with my team?”

“I have to throw away a lot of our arrange lunch, since work locations are never accurate.”

The dark side of hybrid working

New Story is a digital creative agency who embraced hybrid working. Think working from home, at the office, workations, on-site at clients and similar. For this use case Xaler was developed. Allowing employees to specify their work locations and to request (special) leave days. While Xaler solved apparent problems, frustrations and pains were still spread across the organisation.

Due to a planned refactor for Xaler, I identified the opportunity to truly understand the root cause of these underlying frustrations. I convinced to board to pursue the opportunity.

Chosing the research cycle over design thinking

How might I discover the root cause of these underlying pains so that I can create a truly human-centred solution? User research. I chose to focus on the research cycle deliberately.

First step? Asking questions. What would spark a lot of insights? Through critical thinking, I refined my compass:

How does the skillset within a project influence the approval of leave days at digital creative agency New Story?

But, why not design thinking or the double diamond? Because the current solution misses the mark. There are unaddressed underlying problems still. Therefore it’s crucial to truly understand first.

Aiming for overview, data and relevancy

The goal justifies the means. I considered research methods in relation to the goal. In order to understand, I need overview, relevancy and data. Which led to a grounded decision for:

• User interviews — Creates overview of pains, desires, needs and emotions due to its qualitative nature. Being able to ask follow-up questions will spark relevant insights faster. Leads to a big set of qualitative data.
• Dairy studies — Allows me to study behaviour over a longer period. Relevant for the recurring nature of leave- and location requests. Leads to a relevant data set since I can adjust the method’s format to the problem space.

How critical thinking and practical theories assist before recruitment

Through critical thinking and practical recruitment criteria theories, I concluded that I need an equal division between users and admins. Users being execution (marketeers, developers, designers, strategists), admins being management and operations (HR, account/project management, finance). Because I thought about Dutch culture and laws. There’s a difference in allowances and compensations, depending on the location you work from, or the type of leave day you request.

A variety in part- and full-timers I saw as a necessity. People who work part-time spend less time on this topic. While full-timers submit more requests by default.

Finally, I explicitely don't involve direct colleagues due to potential biases. Colleagues have a higher chance in giving reserved answers to interview and diary questions.

A thoroughly thought through planning provides air

I conducted 7 interviews and 7 diary studies across two weeks.

• First week focused on the interviews and kicking off the diary studies;
• so that I could start the analysis of interviews in the second week, while continuing the moderation of diary studies.

As a one-man research army and a 4 week deadline, I understood that analysing the interviews was most time consuming. Especially since I used Google Forms for setting up the diary studies. That’s why I conducted all interviews in the first week, to start my analysis the second.

Headset on, notifications off. Ready, set, analyse!

Thanks to all participants their consent, I was able to record the interviews by audio. My analysis approach was to:

• synthesize all interviews and diaries into single-user empathy maps;
• transforming them into 2 multi-empathy maps to cluster further;
• and base user need statements of them to make insights transferable and actionable.

Tangible insights for a truly human-centred solution

Thanks to all participants their consent, I was able to record the interviews by audio. My analysis approach was to:

• Manual tasks like requests are experienced as dreadful by 90%.
• 60% is annoyed that work locations aren’t requested on time.
• All admins are frustrated about Xaler not being connected to their administrative systems.
• 100% forgets to request their work location from now and then.
• There hasn’t been a single time that a holiday request had to be rejected, due to expertise shortage.

"At the start of the week, I know my work locations for both office and working from home."

"I request my locations at once every week, I make it easier for myself."

The more the merrier

Generated many sketches as they allow for organising my ideas. One of my favourite and therefore most effective method for ideation. I aimed for quantity over quality. Performed multiple Crazy-8’s and documented with annotations to make ideas better transferable.

The elegance of a simple solution

I converged the most desirable solution into a clickable prototype. While constantly informing research insights, to make data-driven decisions like:

• Making the work location overview more accessible.
• Introducing reminders and notifications. Ensuring people will unlikely forget to submit their requests in time.
• Adding dynamic filtering. Which improved request management on both sides.

But my personal favourite due to its simplicity, the ability to set working schedules.

• This feature alone reduces 95% of user frustrations;
• Since it lowers 90% of requests due to its automation.
• People can adjust the schedule at any time and requests will be submitted the next week.
• Taking a day of? Optional office day with the team? The only time a manual request has to be made due to it being an exception.

Being able to set a two schedules was a crucial decision. Some people work 40h in the even weeks, while 32h in the uneven. This made the solution more inclusive since all user segment needs are addressed.

On-brand, cross-OS compatible and accessible

Once tested, I ensured the prototype would become ready for implementation. A different, yet critical thought and decision process kicked off.

• Informed iOS & Android compatible frameworks to ensure feasibility.
• Applied the branding guidelines of New Story.
• Set up a semantic variable system to introduce colored and dark theme for better accessibility.
• Auto-layout on everything, while frequently validated the expected mapping to code. To make engineering happy!