Leave Management App

Introduction

The main idea of this exercise is to come up with a user-friendly leave management system app.Using which the employees can create and track their leave requests and managers can monitor and respond to the requests on a daily basis. I began this task by first finding out the root cause of the problem rather than directly jumping into the solution keeping design thinking philosophy as my guiding principle.

Research & Analyzation

I began my research by analysing employee and manager’s mental models, needs, expectations, and pain points by carrying user research. Also, I got in touch with a set of people who are managers and employees to enquire about their existing leave management system. This knowing played an essential role in understanding the user’s pain points and expectations. In addition to this, to get deeper insights from the user perspective, I have conducted user interviews with around ten users, which helped me to come up with a fictional character to which I can refer while I design. For the interview, I have created a list of questions that included a few open-ended and few follow-up questions, when needed, specific to leave management system.

List of questions:

  • Tell me about your routine?

  • How long do you spend time daily in doing your office related work?

  • Do you have any HR portal for administrative and request purposes?

  • How do you raise a leave request?

  • What do you feel about the current system?

  • How long will it usually take to build a request?

  • How will you get to know whether the request has been approved or rejected?

  • Do you have different types of leaves?

  • How do you select the type of leaves? -How do you access the leave policy?

  • How often do you use this? -what do you like in this app?

  • Do you use a mobile or desktop, and why?

  • What is the first thing that you look at when you use this tool?

  • What do you think about your landing screen?

  • How many features do you have?

  • Which feature do you use often?

  • How relevant is the data that is present on your dashboard?

  • What do you think is the most restricting or frustrating thing in this tool?

  • What do you feel about the leave request feature?

  • Is this intuitive? -Do you see anything repetitive?

  • What is the issue with this that you see?

  • Overall, How do you feel about the portal?

Some of the common answers heard from users are:

Employee-

  • No proper leave request system.

  • For every leave request, I have to write an email requesting my manager.

  • Not sure how long it will take to get approved.

  • Not sure whether my request got approved.

  • I am not sure about my co-worker's leave plans.

  • I don't know whether I have sufficient leave balance or not.

  • Not sure about the leave type and policy.

  • I don't have an option to edit or cancel my leave request.

  • For every edit & cancellation, I have to go through a long process by emailing my manager for approvals.

  • This process is very time-consuming.

  • It keeps me ambiguous about the status.

  • No option to look at my leave history. Managers

  • No proper leave request system.

  • I always have to check & search for the request to approve or reject.

  • I can't keep track of all the requests.

  • I don't have any reminder for requests.

  • I spend a lot of time doing these simple approvals.

User Personas

After consolidating the data from the research, I started to see a few common users patterns, which helped me define personas and resulted in finding answers to the critical questions, and better understand the user's motivations and expectations.

Reviewing other leave system apps

Studying a few similar apps In this phase, I did some research on a few existing leave management systems to recognise the current preferences and user flows.

With a thorough examination and understanding from the research conclusions, I came up with a list of features that I have incorporated into the concept, which I have mentioned below.

Employee

-Create a request

-Request list

-View the status of the request

-Personal calendar

-Team Calendar with leave details

Manager

- Reminder for approval requests

- View the team's calendar for better team management

- Review the requests in detail

Ideation and Design Phase Idea Mapping

I have started the design process by mapping all the essential points and listing all the tasks by arranging them meaningfully together. I have Visualised them for better relatability, affordance for intuitive in the UI. Also, touching upon the topics related to Navigation, UI layouts, flow, labeling & edge cases.

Rapid prototypes -

Mapping the main points gave me a clear vision in creating wireframes to get a complete end to end picture of the solution. I created paper prototypes and came up with some design ideas. I conducted user testing with the paper prototype to evaluate my designs. Based on the user feedback, I have iterated the designs and arrived at the most reliable possible solution within the given time frame.

Wireframes and User Flow