Darren Yee

User

The primary user of this tool is a grocery Store Manager, whose main goal is to use their demand forecast to estimate their future labor to schedule their employees. The more accurate their forecast is, the better prepared they are the day of, which leads to increased labor savings.

Pain Points

• Without an existing tool, users planned labor by intuition leading to inaccurate scheduling,and millions of dollars in labor costs.
• Users do not have access to data that can improve their labor forecasts.
• The business has tried to share helpful data and insights, but users are hesitant to adopt them.

Approach

• User Research: interviewed Store Managers in Voice of Customer Sessions to understand why users were hesitant to use business solutions, and what their ideal experience would be. We uncovered their need for flexibility in editing, and the importance of explaining how data was generated.
• Iterative Design: worked from wireframes, to working prototypes to test assumptions with users while managing business requirements.
• Test & Learn: validated design decisions through usabiltiy tests and surveys.

Challenges

• Stakeholder Management: this project required approval from Product, Engineering, and leaders up the Executive Chain. Each team had differing opinions on how labor should be planned, which affected how we approached the editing function.
• 0 to 1: I conducted user research to understand their flow, and worked with Product to schedule featured releases based on the essential use cases.
• Engineering Constraints: I ran design sprints with Engineering Leads to iterate solutions that solved the user needs within the constraints.
• Building a Design System in Parallel: While designing 0 to 1, I also worked with the Design System to build core components when they were needed in my designs. I contributed the core table component, which was tested for scalability by our QA team, and validated across our organization.
• Business vs. User Needs: Due to funding, the team needed multiple features implemented in this project. Some of these features were not essential to the core user. To compromise, I structured the Information Architecture to include additional features, while focusing the user's attention on the task at hand.