TrackTik SHIFT, the latest addition to TrackTik’s Back Office module, helps seamlessly connect supervisors to their officers in the field. Officers can view their schedule, receive up-to-date shift information and notifications, and review their employee profile electronically. This helps streamline supervisor tasks and increases employee engagement throughout your security operations.

My Role & Responsibilities

As the sole UX designer in a team of 8 ( 1 PO, 4 Front End, 1 Back End and 1 QA) working in an agile environment (2 week sprints), I touched all aspects of the product design from user interviews, interaction design, UX writing, design QA and usability testing. This project had a timeline of 13 months from inception to launch.

Why TrackTik SHIFT?

For years, TrackTik has been in the business of helping connect frontline, back office, management, and customers in one place to bring fluidity to security operations. However the focus for the longest time has been heavily on management, back office and customers; to the point where frontline officers were still getting their work schedules through a one way email or text without any ability to communicate their availabilities with their managers. This had not only become growingly frustrating for frontline officers but also for managers who were constantly getting last minute call-offs and no-shows for shifts.

Managers were spending most of their work hours on phone calls with officers trying to find a suitable fulfillment for different shifts.

One solution to rule them all

Early on in our research doing user interviews, we realized a significant conflict between manager needs and officer needs. While managers wanted the least amount of autonomy given to officers; officers obviously wanted much more autonomy and trust. However in further questioning managers, we found that they only care that all shifts are fulfilled so they can bill the clients and they feared that giving officers more autonomy would lead to more call offs, no shows.

So finding a design solution that allows officers more autonomy while leading to increased shift fulfillment was definitely a challenge. For every feature we flowed out a way to add the ability for officers to challenge their schedules, to update their availabilities etc.; while at the same time ensuring every input from the officer go through an approval phase by the managers.

Schedule without a calendar? aka the first roadblock

Somehow the idea of designing a schedule view with a Google-esque calendar component was implanted in our heads from the get go. We never questioned the need or the technical constraint for it. On the other hand, our developers were all web based and were only learning Native Script so they were not aware of the complexities that come with building a custom calendar component. And once we took 2 whole months to build the calendar, it was buggy and did not really add much to the user experience.

So we put it to test and did usability testing with multiple internal stakeholders to understand how users would browse the schedules. Funnily enough barely 25% of testers even used the calendar component. So we went back to the drawing board and really scoped down on this feature and did a minimal calendar feature which actually worked as users expected.

Everyone deserves visibility of their earnings

Security officers are hard workers who have lacked any sort of visibility over their approved work hours, earning rates, etc. In the past, officers using TrackTik would have to log in to a web portal (only supported on desktop) with extremely clunky UI and unintuitive UX to try to find any information on their earnings. Now with TrackTik Shift, we found a way to prioritize the most important information officers want/need to see and display all that in an intuitive manner.

Solving a million dolar problem

As per California law, officers have to be a minimum certain amount of breaks in between their shifts. This was a major pain point for our clients who had tons of lawsuits in their hands because employees claimed in court that they were not given sufficient breaks and our clients had no real mechanism in place to prove otherwise. We had a client who specifically had to pay over a million dollars to settle a few lawsuits.

So we dug deep to find a quick solution to avoid any more clients losing money. We quickly learned in conversations with these clients that the solution is not to force officers to take breaks; it’s rather having a process in place to have sufficient documentation for break exceptions. So we quickly added a solution where clients can setup their own custom break rules and every time an officer would skip their scheduled break, the app would force them to input a reason for their actions.

Key Takeaways

1. It’s crucial to understand the technical constraints at play for a specific project (especially when dealing with a tight deadline). For this project specifically, because we were working with a team of new native script developers, it was significant to try to keep interactions and visual components as simple as possible to be able to launch our product when clients expected it.

2. Accessibility and Inclusivity may be overly used terms in the design world but it was a major learning experience in this project. Our users consisted of a significant proportion of men aged over 50. We learned really quickly that using tiny fonts with light colours were not readable for these users. Tiny buttons close to each other lead to a lot of miss clicks. The app may not have ended up looking as sexy as Instagram or Google Suite but the target users can easily use it and that is the mission after all.