Rachel Hui| 7shifts: Employee Approval of Time Punches

Product Overview

7shifts is an all-in-one platform for restaurant team management. Our goal is to solve for the entire employee lifecycle: hiring, training, scheduling, paying, and retaining.

My Role

This was a cross-domain collaboration project between a web and mobile team. I was responsible for the web designs, and another designer was responsible for the mobile designs. However, as the project flow was fairly intertwined between mobile and web and involved different users, we worked together during the ideation phase and brainstormed solutions for both platforms. Only when we narrowed down on solutions did we split back into working on high-fidelity mocks in the platform that we each owned.

Scope and Constraint

Although I was responsible for the web designs, I was on the compliance team which worked separately from the team that managed web time clocking, so my designs were constrained as I had to work in another team's domain. As a result, I had to work within the constraints of their domain and ensure that my designs did not interfere with theirs. I had to include their team as stakeholders in the project and make sure that I did not make any changes that could impact their designs.
To reduce the scope of the project, we decided to focus only on the core platforms that were used by the majority of the users. We found that 99% of employees used the mobile app regularly, and 90% of managers approved punches on the web. Therefore, the MVP was designed only for these core platforms.

The Problem

In order to gain a better understanding of the problem, I conducted some industry research and also familiarized myself with the relevant laws. An investigation by the Department of Labor found that nearly 84 percent of investigated restaurants had some sort of wage and hour violation. This data also does not include restaurants getting sued by their employees for wage theft.
As for the law, it is a legal requirement to maintain documentation for every instance of a time record including it's creation or modification. In addition, both the employee and manager must acknowledge and confirm the accuracy of such records.

Research

After some basic industry research, I conducted user interviews with some of our current customers who are interested in this feature. A variety of questions were asked involving current processes, compliance, employee perspectives, and competitors.
This research helped us identify three main problems:

Opportunity

This project was crucial not only because it was a highly requested feature but also because it provided significant value to the business. We believe that this feature will help drive time-clocking adoption as we will have a built-in compliance solution that stores everything digitally.
After conducting user interviews, we discovered that the most common workaround for tracking employee timesheets was to print them out, have the employees sign them, and then store them in the manager's back office. However, this workaround is not sustainable or scalable as the law requires employment records to be kept for up to 5 years, depending on the jurisdiction.
Lastly, by driving more time-clocking adoption, it will also set us up for success as we were getting ready to launch a payroll solution. This will allow the restaurant to move seamlessly down the payroll journey with an all-in-one solution.

Ideation

With that in mind, I started brainstorming possible solutions, listed their benefits and risks, and also mapped out potential flows. This exercise helped us to visualize possible experiences for users and evaluate whether our solutions would actually solve their problems before we narrowed down on a solution to move forward with. We explored ideas of varying sizes, including options for a separate app. Our employees already use a separate app to punch in and out, which can also be downloaded onto POS devices.

After aligning with different stakeholders and our development team, we eventually landed on a concept that was medium in scale and addressed the most important use cases for our users. I then started sketching, iterating, and then eventually building high-fidelity mockups and prototypes to test with users. I also mapped out different flows depending on different users and their starting points.

Hi-Fidelity Mockups

After conducting concept testing with users, we arrived at a solution that allows employees to either approve or dispute individual time punches using the 7shifts mobile app. Managers can review comments left on disputed punches and make necessary edits to ensure more accurate payroll.
‍This solution addresses all three goals that we identified

1. Registration Process
Youpi's redesign allows users from Canada and China to create a Youpi account. The form is kept short so users can quickly browse the app without spending much time at the registration. The phone number is used as the main identifier of the user as it is more unique, and an email is used as a secondary identifier that will mostly be used for account retrieval.

2. Login Process
Each user is identified based on their phone numbers, as it is more of a unique identifier while compared to an email. An alternative login method for Youpi's login process was wanted as the H5 platform didn't save passwords, which frustrated the users who often forget their passwords. Therefore, a mobile verification login method was added. A code will be sent to the user so the users are not required to remember their passwords. As long as they can receive an SMS, they will always be able to log in.

3. Forgot Password
Based on the feedback and the newly created personas, we discovered that one of the user group travel often, and might not be able to retrieve an SMS code for resetting their passwords. Therefore, we added an email verification code retrieval option for this type of user. Although emails are used as a secondary identifier, users still have to verify their emails when they register, and they also have to verify both the old and new emails when they want to change their email.

4. Third-Party Authorization
With third-party authorization, users can speed through the registration process. Since the third-party app doesn't have all the form fields that we require, we added an additional "complete your profile" form. The form field was shortened so users only have to fill in the necessary fields for creating an account, and the rest of the information can be completed in the app's profile section.

7shifts | Employee Approval of Time Punches

How might we allow employees and managers to quickly review time punches so that employees are paid accurately and a compliant record is kept for any future labor disputes?