TIMTHIANTHAI
Time Entry App for Utilities Company
For more than 40 years, SAP has developed over 300,000 screens. And most of our customers are using screens that are more than 20 years old. Our customer for this project, a big East Coast utilities company, falls into that category. They asked us to create a custom solution to improve the time entry app, which their employees use to enter, approve, and report work times.
We created four personas: Time Keeper (shown), Supervisor, Time Entry Approver, and Director—each with detailed pain points we discovered based on 11 interviews.
We built multiple journey maps for different roles with Post-Its around the room at our customer’s site, validated them with our users, then digitized them (shown) before we flew back to California.
My Role
Research & Design
I worked in a team of three designers who together performed user research on site, interaction design, and visual design. After we synthesized the data, we created the first iteration of our designs separately in the form of wireframes. Then we came together to discuss our designs, gave one another feedback, and pulled elements from each design to create a final solution. We then “divided and conquered” to produce final deliverables including journey maps, personas, “issues cards” (summary of user issues), high-fidelity screens with interaction guide, visual specifications, and project summary deck.
We created “Issue Cards” to summarize high-level issues for each role with memorable quotes. They later came in handy when we communicated our process with other stakeholders.
We critiqued one another’s wireframes (shown) to produce the final design, one with the most fluid and simplified interaction flow.
Challenges & Takeaways
Human Error
Human error is inevitable, but can be minimized. We quickly learned during our research about factors that caused inaccurate data. For example, numbers on the timesheet were not written (by hand) correctly as much as 50% of the time before they were sent to our users; some users would skip the required steps or input wrong code/number because the system did not stop them; and so on. We added helpful features to alleviate this issue and shorten the data-input time such as pre-populated data, drop-down selections, and inline-error handling.
Redesigning an Old App
Simplification was our top priority. We started our early iterations by eliminating unwanted elements from the screen based on our research, but it did not seem to be enough. We quickly learned that the biggest obstacle with redesigning an existing app was getting the image of the old layout and interactions out of our heads. To erase that image and simplify the user experience, we decided to dismantle the old layout completely and redesign the app using only the needed elements.
Earning Trust
Our team, SAP Design & Co-Innovation Center, was relatively young and unknown among SAP colleagues. For this project, we also reported to SAP stakeholders who had worked with this particular customer for a long time. Often, we were asked to design something that did not reflect our research, as they insisted it would be what the customer wanted. When it was not negotiable, we learned the best way to maintain a good relationship was to do what was asked of us to show we were capable, but also to provide a better alternative with reasons to stay true to our research and deliver to the customer what we thought was the best solution.
Our design also aimed to reduce human error by providing features such as smart drop-down or inline-error handling when the input data is not right or accurate.
Simplifying does not necessarily mean eliminating. Sometimes adding a main feature that allows the user to work faster, like the ability to copy data from one date to others, also helps.
Results
The customer was impressed with our design because, even though it did not resemble the old app, it answered all the needs and greatly reduced the amount of time to perform each task, as well as accounted for human error. Our users usually came in on Sunday, at overtime rates, to enter time. Now, they can complete all the tasks on Monday morning before Payroll runs. During our process, one of our team goals was to change the perception of SAP design (to the better) and we achieved that, both for our customer and also for the internal stakeholders with whom we worked.
Even though our new design did not resemble the old app, it answered all of the user needs in a much more simplified screen and user flow.