The Challenge

How might we improve planning visibility to help admins and field workers stay aligned and organized?

Business and project context

ToolTime is an early-stage startup in Berlin that is building administrative tools for craftsmen companies. Spanning across web and mobile, the product is aimed towards helping simplify processes of scheduling, documentation, and invoicing. As the customer base rapidly expanded, the limitations of the MVP became apparent.

The outcome

With research and user tests, one of the key areas identified for improvement was the planning flow. The current planning views failed to provide both admins and craftsmen with a clear, organized overview of daily tasks, resulting in confusion, miscommunication, and scheduling conflicts within the team. We redesigned the planning interface on mobile and web to offer a more clear layout and prioritized task visibility.

How was research done?

We approached this challenge by focusing on the needs of both admins and craftsmen. We started by listening to our existing clients to gather their needs and identify their typical workflows both in back-office work as well as on worksites. Through one-on-one interviews and contextual inquiries, we gained insights into how they currently manage daily tasks and the pain points they encounter when using the existing planning views.

In conjunction, we also investigated quantitative insights using amplitude to get a measure of the breadth of the problem and highlight any patterns in user behaviour.

Solutions exploration for information architecture

We ran short ideation workshops to generate different approaches for addressing each of the discovered problems. With the help of the customer success team, we conducted studies and gathered feedback from our users on the various directions.

Release and Impact

After generating satisfactory feedback from beta users, we rolled out the updated planning views to the broader user base. This launch was accompanied by targeted communication to ensure users understood the new features and how they addressed previous pain points. A significant drop in overdue backlog was visible, indicating improved task management and increased efficiency in team coordination.

Going beyond

For the mobile app we also determined each of the tabbed pages would also be an excellent opportunity to help our users get familiar with the product and the new architecture. As the company and the client base were scaling at a fast pace, we increasingly also wanted to ensure that the products, wherever possible, rely less on the onboardings done by the customer success team.