Product Modernization
WT & TG have been a staple softwares for TEAM Software since their formation in 1989. WT is a comprehensive ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system focused on financial and workforce management for North American cleaning/security contractors. TG is a workforce management and operational tool primarily focused on real-time attendance, scheduling, and service delivery, popular in international markets. Long story short, not a lot of design was put into their creation, and since the 90’s, small patches have been added but it was in need of a facelift. The reality is, a lot more goes into the redesign than just a facelift. We wanted to fix the pain points for our users, improve the usability, and design a new product that still feels familiar, and intuitive to our power users. Sounds simple enough, right?
THE LEGACY PRODUCT
Both WT and TG were built without a designer. They are powerhouses of the security and cleaning software, and the power users can fly through the product with only their keyboards. However, because there were no designers present for the first 30 years, engineers built everything to work the way they thought it should work. New users find it incredibly confusing, modern patterns don't exist, everything requires jumping between multiple screens and we've frankenstein'd this product together with features tacked on.
THE PROBLEM & COMPLEXITIES
WT and TG were entering the mid 2020's looking like a Windows 95 product. Companies are popping up yearly that are vying for our customer base, offering software that was built with todays standard of modern design. That means modern patterns, modern components, less gradients, and a product that you can figure out without reading a paper manual. In business terms, we have a large pool of legacy users, who have been with us for decades, but we aren't keeping up with the new softwares. Our competition are taking any of our potential new customers and some of our existing customers are getting fed up with promises of modernizing year after year, and are leaving. We need to keep retention high, and offer a modern suite of software that attracts new customers. Simple as that, right? Well our product has over 3 decades of features tacked on, which means the rules & permissions for our Schedule boards are very deep. Certain operations are nested with other features, manually changing the billing code effects how much a company has to pay their employee, which effects the weekly budget, their over-time, could trip exceptions on the shift because certain certifications are not checked-off, this would trigger further validation errors and require multiple steps to manually complete for a seemingly "simple" change. Let me show you some of the more "fun" features of our legacy product:
Very unusual patterns exist in our legacy product. For example, clicking on a field with a drop down opens the container
However, double clicking the dropdown opens a different container….sometimes
This pattern is unusual, and exists in only 2-3 other places across 600+ screens
This is just an example of the many complexities that were tacked onto screens over decades, and is not friendly to users
Below you can see just 4 of the 15 tabs that control the schedule data. Changing one single field can have drastic results on a users schedule board.
The challenge wasn't really that our scheduling UI was old. The deeper problem was that we had built up 30 years of business rules and workflows around it. Users had learned how to work around the system, and those workarounds had become part of the product. So our goal wasn't to redesign everything. We needed to modernize the workflow while preserving the parts of the system that users relied on.
THE SOLUTION IMPACT
Jumping ahead, the solution here is to create a modernized version of the schedule board. This includes building a contract page, the physical schedule board, the functionality that we learned is most sought after and helpful for moving the needle for our customers. They want faster, with less back and forth, and ultimately, more time back in their busy schedule to focus on what matters most, running their business. Below shows a before and after of both contract creation, and schedule filling. The left image is the before, the right is the after. But how we got there is the design journey I went on that I'll outline in the following sections.
TG Contract creation
TG Schedule creation
THE DESIGN PROCESS
I won't go into too much detail here on the depth of the design process. I have another case study where I speak to the collaborative team structure I piloted teaming up with one PM, one engineer, and one designer (myself). We collaborated on countless figjam boards, brain storming sessions, user discovery, interviews, rapid prototyping, co-creation with our users, and ultimately, our delivery. That can be found here if you're interested in reading more about it: Empowered Product Teams
Discover
Define
Design
Deliver
a collage of figma sections outlining the discovery work just fro the schedule board creation. Between figjams and design whiteboarding, there was an unruly number of arrows drawn, stickies created, and highlights made.
Open Posts
Filling open posts isn’t as quick and easy as customers would like, meaning they’re spending more time on their schedule, filling open posts.
Overtime Pay
Similar to open posts, the lack of AI integration to easily find the most suitable candidate feels like we’re not keeping up with the industry. Discovering which employees are the most suitable is easier with other products.
Poor Usability
Feels like we are wasting time with redundant steps, a high program-specific-IQ is required to efficiently use WT, and overall creates hurdles that lead to poor overall usability.
TRADE-OFFS
Like every good project, there's some design trade-offs that need to be made. Even with strong user insights and a clear understanding of pain points, solutions are shaped by business goals, legacy constraints, and the need to hit our deadlines quarter after quarter. Below are only some of the deliberate compromises that moved the product forward without losing sight of the user.
Our Survey says 5 steps is ideal:
