Company PickTrace
Role Product Designer, User Researcher
Duration 2 week research sprint | 3 week design process
Status Phase 1 released; Phase 2 on backlog
Responsibilities Conduct user research with clients | Design solution | Obtain user validation | Track success metrics
Context: What is PickTrace?
PickTrace operates in the agriculture space.
Think about the apples, cherries, peaches that you see at your chain supermarket or Costco:
The people who picked that fruit have probably interacted with PickTrace.
PickTrace aims to accurately track labour and productivity out in the fruit and veggie fields and create timecards to make sure workers get paid fairly for their work.
PickTrace operates across 3 platforms and is connected by the cloud
Like all great problems, it started out with a Slack...
Maria is an Implementations Manager at PickTrace. Her job is to train up customers on the PickTrace system and help them establish workflows to optimize their usage of our software. She is on the road all the time visiting one customer after another and constantly fielding customer calls.
What is the Move Crew feature?
Move Crew is a feature that tracks transitions of jobs and locations on the Android field device.
Field crews often work multiple locations or jobs in a day, and Move Crew serves to track all these transitions.
Eg. A typical schedule could looks like this:
7 am - 12 pm: Apple Picking at Location Alpha
1 pm - 4 pm: Tree Trimming at Location Beta
We are recording the location change from Location Alpha to Location Beta as well as the job transition from Apple Picking to Tree Trimming.
Why is Move Crew a Problem?
Problem Statements
1. Field users struggle with learning how to use the Move Crew functionality.
2. The implementation managers are allocating above average time and resources to train, retrain, and support the Move Crew function.
Problem Validation
To start, I interviewed all 7 members of the implementation team and customer experience team to validate that Move Crew is indeed a huge pain point for the team.
The response from implementations was unanimous: Move Crew is a huge pain point that takes up more resources that it should, and they dread training users on that feature.
I then gathered all product feedback pertaining to the Move Crew feature from our internal Product Feedback Tracker.
Usability Issues
Solution Strategy
I proposed a phased approach to the problem.
Phase 1: Experience clean up
There are three pain points where quick changes to the current UI would ease the pain, doesn't disrupt the current experience too much and requires low investment from engineering. These quick wins introduced some quality of life improvements that clarified the workflow to reduce support from the implementation team.
Phase 2: Extensive redesign
I've identified that the wizard pattern is something that would enable a quicker (and smoother) learning curve for our users, and it's also a pattern that can be applied to other complex workflows, so the high investment in engineering efforts would be scalable.
Phase 1
Addresses Usability Issues #1, 2, 5
Phase 2
Addresses Usability Issues #1-6
When I went on a customer visit while working on Move Crew, I noticed that device users were interacting with our devices rather gingerly. I took a closer look and observed the following:
1. Device users perform manual labor out on the field and tend to have larger hands and therefore fingers.
2. Female device users commonly have long manicured nails.
To validate the first observation, I asked a few device users to trace their thumb and index finger on my notebook. When I returned home to measure the outlines, I realized that their touch zones are at least 40% larger than the average user (according to the MIT Touchlab Study on Human Fingertips to Investigate the Mechanics of Tactile Sense), so the standard 40px for buttons does not apply to this specific demographic. Hence the decision to increase the touch zone from 40px to 56px.
Next steps
Phase 1 has been released and the customer response has been positive. Offices report that phone calls asking for support walking through the Move Crew workflow have gone down significantly.
The Phase 2 prototype has been user tested on current users and while the reception has been positive, I wish to test on new users to measure how long it takes the user to master the feature and how much post-training support they require.
