Roster Revamp: From Chaos to Control!
Roster Revamp: From Chaos to Control!
TEAM
TEAM
MY ROLE
MY ROLE
My main responsibilities include creating new visuals for our traditional, non-intuitive UI. Central to my role are engaging with onboarded clients, collaborating with other stakeholders, including PMs and clients, and leveraging insights gained from client interviews to inform design decisions.
My main responsibilities include creating new visuals for our traditional, non-intuitive UI. Central to my role are engaging with onboarded clients, collaborating with other stakeholders, including PMs and clients, and leveraging insights gained from client interviews to inform design decisions.
Improved our “Roster” product to acheive market standards by improving overall UI & UX
Improved our “Roster” product to acheive market standards by improving overall UI & UX
TIMELINE FOR DESIGN
TIMELINE FOR DESIGN
3 months
3 months
OUTCOME
OUTCOME
New Client Acquisitions
New Client Acquisitions
Successfully converted new clients which includes Accenture, Reliance etc.,
Successfully converted new clients which includes Accenture, Reliance etc.,
Reduced Support Effort
Reduced Support Effort
The improved design decreased the workload for our solution team.
The improved design decreased the workload for our solution team.
B2B
B2B
Before revamp
After revamp
Before revamp
After revamp
Betterplace, roster, blah blah..?
Who is betterplace:
BetterPlace is Asia’s leading human capital SaaS platform, empowering enterprises to manage the complete lifecycle of their frontline workforce. As an HRMS solution, BetterPlace addresses every aspect of frontline workforce management, including discovery, hiring, onboarding, background verification, payroll, upskilling, and services such as vendor management, workforce fulfillment, insurance, and credit. Our solutions are used by over 1,500 businesses across 500 locations in the APAC, India, and GCC regions.
“Attend” is one of the products in our HRMS solution that helps companies manage the attendance and shift schedules of their frontline workers.
Hire
Onboard
Verify
Attend
Payroll
Upskill
Benefits
Vendors
Betterplace hrms pRODUCTS
aTTEND PRODUCT FEATURES
roster
lOGS
MANAGE Sites
reports
Approval
Roster is a schedule of employees that shows who is working, what tasks they’re doing, and their shift timings, including breaks, to keep everything organized.
What is Roster
Effortless Attendance Management
With Attend, tracking employee attendance and managing records becomes effortless. This feature enables employers to access and update attendance data anytime, streamlining processes and saving valuable time.
Smarter Shift Planning with Roster
The “Roster” feature transforms how shift allocations are handled. By syncing with leave data and payroll, it eliminates the need for traditional methods like notebooks and ensures accurate payroll calculations
Manager-Centric Solutions
Empower site managers to assign shifts seamlessly for their teams. This case study focuses on enhancing shift planning from the manager’s perspective.
Betterplace hrms pRODUCTS
CLIENT
Reliance
has many plants across India
Including 13 SITES in Chennai
In a single site, one supervisor uses our roster to manage shifts for 30 employees.
Chennai
13 sites
ECR SITE
36 employees
SITE SUPERVISOR
roster
eXAMPLE
But how it all started?
Story time
The Forgotten Roster
The old team made the roster four years ago and left it to gather dust—no updates since then.
Old Files, New Surprises
When we got the chance to work on the Attend product, we dug into old research and found a physical attendance sheet.
What’s the Big Problem?
The old team had pointed out manual attendance and shift problems and designed the roster to fix them—sounds good, right?
Let’s See What Clients Think
Curious about how the roster was holding up, we called up a client using the Attend product.
Plot Twist: They’re Not Using It
To our surprise, they weren’t using the roster feature at all. They were bulk uploading Excel files instead—talk about a shortcut!
Other Clients...Same Story
We reached out to two other clients, and guess what? They were doing the same thing—skipping the roster feature.
Non-Users Speak Up
We asked clients who didn’t use the Attend product why they stayed away.
Roster Fail: The Dealbreaker
The reason? They didn’t subscribe because the roster feature was broken, with a confusing UI that made it impossible to use.
The Cost of Bad Design
We learned the hard way that one bad design decision cost us clients and money. Lesson learned!
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Lets find out the problem
Approach 1
Approaches
To identify the common and important problems to focus on, we used two approaches:
We spoke with the people who are actively using our roster.
We conducted a self-evaluation to validate their feedback.
User interviews
Self evaluation
Common and most important points we have to focus
Approach 1
Research with users
Some users don’t know how to do the process by themselves because of the complex UI so our company setup a solution team and group of 3 people to handle this shift allotment request from the client
We scheduled a call with managers from client side and the people from our solution who are working on this roster creation.
Key questions we asked our Users
What are the steps involved in your current rostering process?
Can you provide a walkthrough of how you manage the process?
What software or tools do you currently use for rostering, apart from the Betterplace product?
What features do you find missing in our roster?
What aspects of the current roster feature do you like?
Some honest answers from our user 🫢
"We need an option to save the roster schedule as a template and use it in multiple other months quickly."
"I want to add the shifts quickly. Until then, I won’t even consider using this."
"Excel is better compared to your roster product. Why should I waste money on your product?"
"What if I could assign multiple employees to a single shift? That would save us more time.
"I’d love a way to add recurring shifts automatically instead of doing it manually every time."
Approach 2
Self evaluation
Conducted a self-evaluation of our design using heuristic principles and our design intuition. This helped us identify key areas for improvement and ensure the design aligned with user needs.
(Finding will discussed along with the solution in the solution section)
FINDINGS
Findings from the research
The primary functions of the roster, like adding shifts, marking weekly offs, and managing leaves, aren’t working properly because of the unintuitive UI.
Rostering is currently being done entirely in Excel and then uploaded to our system due to the complexity of the workflows.
The UI requires significant rework, as users expect a better experience than what is currently available.
It takes approximately 15 to 20 mins for a manager supervising an average of 40 employees at a site to complete the roster, which is too slow.
Some clients want the ability to create a roster once and set rules for it to repeat automatically based on different shifts and timings for subsequent months.
Interestingly, even members of our solutions team find the process difficult to complete, despite being well-versed in it.
So the problem is clear now,
Approach 1
Buisness problem:
We have potential customers who are ready to pay, but we are missing out on the opportunity due to usability issues and the poorly designed and built system.
Approach 1
User problem:
The roster was meant to make things faster, but it ended up being a tedious process that reduced productivity. Why should they spend money on a product that doesn’t do what they need?
DEFINED PROBLEM TO SOLVE
So the goal is loud and clear.
Need complete revamp of the entire roster feature to help employers schedule and manage employee shifts without errors, which will attract more clients to purchase our product and ultimately increase our revenue.
Visual Solution
Our approach
Path to bring solution
To make the data easy to interpret our approach was to treat each roster creation steps into different milestones:
MILESTONE 1
Roster Home
Focuses on the homepage of the roster.
Shifts + their various states.
Decluttering the flow
MILESTONE 2
Shift creation
New flow for how users create shifts.
Experiment with new features.
MILESTONE 3
Add-ons elements
This includes features designed to help users work more efficiently, along with additional dropdowns and popup flows.
Milestone 1
Roster home
Our approach
Enhancing Design
Out of all the problems we identified, the biggest issue users face is with the shift creation process. It’s not intuitive, the UI is poor, and it doesn’t provide a good experience.
Therefore, the most important thing we want to address is reducing the time taken for shift creation and improving the UI of that flow
M1.1
Shift component
Before
After
M1.2
Top controls
Before
After
M1.3
Filter panel
Before
After
Milestone 2
Shift creation
Before
After
Milestone 3
Add-ons elements
M3.1
Date range picker
M3.2
Publish site interaction
M3.3
Copy shift schedule
M3.4
Save and Load template
M3.5
Download / upload roster
Time to Flex Our Impact Muscles.
Approach 1
Buisness problem:
We introduced the feature in phases, starting with the “Homepage” and “add-on” changes, followed by the rollout of the “new shift-adding” feature two weeks later. Here are some of the key impacts we achieved after the launch.
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Reduced resource allocation
Each of our solution team member now handles 8-10 client queries simultaneously, replacing the earlier 1:1 ratio.
What this projectTaught Me?
Learnings
Talk Before You Build
Talk to your users before you build anything. Our product wouldn’t have been so flawed if the initial team had conducted proper user interviews before building.
Trust Your Gut (And Act)
Take initiative when your instincts nudge you. While reviewing old files, we guessed that making a small change could help users—and it did. Without that initiative, this impact wouldn’t have happened.
Other works
Best experienced on a laptop or bigger screen.