Employee Conversion
Accelerating a mundane task
- UI Design
- User Observation
- Interview
Accelerating a mundane task
I served as UX Lead for this feature in PACT Planner—a web application that helps program analysts maximize profit for government contractors by planning labor across different efforts.
To access employee timecard data (crucial for labor planning), PACT Planner requires users to link employees to specific work assignments. Because analysts begin planning projects before work assignments are finalized, PACT Planner enables users to add 'unapproved' employees, who are linked to basic personal information but not yet to a work assignment. If the employee expected to fill a role is unknown or not yet part of the employee database, users can create 'placeholder' employees, whose information must be entered manually.
"Even though they don't have a work assignment yet, we might go ahead and start allocating towards them." -PACT Planner user
Once work assignments are generated, users can link both unapproved and placeholder employees to these assignments and access their timecard data by converting them to 'approved' employees.
Exploratory user observation sessions and interviews revealed that users found the employee conversion process tedious and time-consuming.
I started by interviewing users to better understand how the employee conversion feature was being used. We learned that users typically:
Using insights from user interviews, I whiteboarded potential solutions with a colleague. We discussed but ruled out automatic employee conversion, since linking a work assignment without user input is impossible in most cases. Instead, we settled on the idea of a multi-convert option that would allow users to convert many employees simultaneously.
I iterated through low-fi mockups for a multi-convert concept and presented several to our design team, eventually settling on and creating a prototype for a design that allowed users to link all placeholder/unapproved employees to work assignments on one screen. The design leveraged existing UI patterns to reduce development costs.
After receiving positive feedback from a group of users during a prototype walkthrough, I collaborated with developers to break the feature into chunks for our agile team to implement. I created design deliverables for each and met with developers to communicate specifications, answer questions, and discuss the feature’s purpose.
Our final solution, the bulk convert employees feature, lets users convert all convertible employees at once. Where possible, it auto-fills a work assignment for employees using a combination of user-entered and source of record employee information. Checkmark icons are used to reinforce which employees will be converted upon clicking ‘Convert’.
Users can manually select or change a work assignment using an intelligent search field that suggests work assignments based on each employee’s information. Since there are hundreds, unapproved employees aren’t included in search suggestions until the user types at least one character.
We improved the employees table by adding conversion buttons to each convertible employee. This makes it easier for users to convert employees individually and clearly identifies which employees are eligible for conversion. We also designed icons to represent different types of conversions.
Users responded positively to this feature in follow-up interviews:
"Converting placeholders is something that we do a lot of and this makes the workflow a lot easier."
"It's coming in super handy, being able to multi-convert. I mean, it's been great."
“I love it. It's great."
From basic self-testing, I estimated that converting 10 employees is approximately 90% faster using the bulk convert feature. For what it's worth, I also noticed this feature being used frequently while reviewing session recordings.
I'm certain that bulk employee conversion has alleviated a significant pain point for our users.