Workload

Web application Leaving the worksheets to have everything in the same place.

One of the manufacturing teams in IBM needs a way to calculate the workload and payroll to have the stations ready to work when needed; they use a bunch of excel files to calculate that. Users don't have a great experience understanding the formulas used in excel. The challenge was to make a simple version of this process, unifying the inputs from the brands to have standard outputs with being able to customize each family of products keeping formulas away from users.

My role in the project

As the UX Designer, I collaborated with the development team as a facilitator in the discovery phase to understand the current process, take the requirements, define goals, and create a backlog and project roadmap.

My main job was to have a preliminary UX prototype using the Carbon design system.

Also, I collaborated as a Scrum master; my job was to organize the sessions with users, facilitate Agile sessions with the team and follow up on the development of the application.

Constraints, processes, and activities

The actual process involved several excel files used by different teams that were adding information to calculate the workforce; our first challenge was to understand each of the methods, the needs of the users of each area, and how they were related. To understand the processes, their similarities, and where they converge, we had several sessions with the teams involved where they explained the current approach to us. After this, we meet with the development team to make a process proposal for the users.

At this point, it was beneficial to make low-fidelity wireframes to review the proposal with the users, test and get feedback, and iterate.

After this, we move on to mockups in adobe xd to validate the interface and be able to start web development.

One of the challenges was to contemplate the human part that gives it excess in the process so that it is not lacking that extra percentage without affecting costs but making the template calculation work.

This process usually took many hours and was reduced to a calculation in the web tool that only took a few minutes. For the organization, being able to carry out this process in minutes helps reduce costs when hiring the staff; it also makes it easier for them to validate various scenarios before making a decision that has a high cost.