Blue Roster

Manufacturing companies have many challenges affecting both supervisors and floor workers, for instance:

1. Supervisors are burdened by outdated processes which heavily rely on pen-and-paper methods, leading to redundant data entry, lack of real-time data for decision making. On top of that, critical information, such as verbal agreements, remain undocumented which can lead potential issues.
2. Floor workers get frustrated and lose trust in their supervisors and companies due to constant changes in their working days and hours provoked by changes in the production schedules.

In summary, supervisors need better tools to track agreements, to improve their human resource management and to respond to constant production changes. Floor workers need more control and visibility of their work schedules and transparency about how decisions are made.

1. I began by facilitating a workshop to establish a common understanding among team members and identify key features. This also  helped to introduce our clients to the process of software development and to establish clear expectations in terms of progress and speed.
2. I created prototypes to gather initial feedback about our proposed product. This helped us to discover challenges, such as, users scepticism that we could solve their problems and designing simple and transparent interfaces for very complex processes.
3. I extended our prototype, had interviews with potential users and visited manufacturing plants to understand the context of use of our application. We learned about how limited access floor workers have to digital devices during work time and the amount of uncertainty that supervisors need to manage day to day.
4. We kept iterating. I conducted A/B tests using moderated and unmoderated techniques and getting closer to our clients to unveil new challenges.

1. Kickstarted the project, defined the project’s scope and initial roadmap. I did this by running a Design Sprint with the consulting firm owners and the development team.
2. Defined the information architecture and user flows for the project’s platform. These were initially based on the consulting firm’s experience and evolved as we conducted more interviews and usability tests.
3. Defined 20 features for the product’s pilot version and designed more than 400 screens. This includes empty states, happy paths, error states, variants for A/B testing and variants needed to communicate with the dev team.
4. During my time as full time UX Designer, we finished the first version of the software (mobile and desktop) and it was already being tested with 3 big manufacturing clients in the US.

Currently, the primary mode of communication between shift workers and companies is face-to-face or through bulletin boards. This means that, when employees are outside the company, they have little access to information regarding their schedules, news or even their vacations. One of the main goals of the application was to change that by giving live visibility about current and future changes to employee’s schedules, giving employees access to personal information (e.g. remaining off days) and allowing them to express and record their personal preferences on cases such as overtime.

Navigating Supervisor Scepticism: Supervisors doubted the tool’s capacity to solve their unique challenges influenced by regulations and company policies. To address this, I conducted co-design sessions were supervisors could sketch on top of our interface as they explained what they would change and why. This exercise helped us to improve the interface and to garner buy-in from supervisors, fostering more open discussions for the rest of the project.

As mentioned before, Blue Roster was implemented and tested with manufacturing companies in the US and its still in production. During my participation we reached the expected goals: to validate the product idea in real scenarios and with real clients, to implement a first version of a tool that digitized supervisors’ workflow and a mobile app that gave floor workers more control over their work schedules.