This is Intraday,
WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT SUITE
Intraday is the most crucial and mammoth part of the entire Workforce Optimisation suite as it stitches both the performance as well as real-time people management capabilities.
The representative wireframes are shown below.
Context
PRODUCT
Intraday, a part of the Workforce Optimisation Suite (WFO), is a crucial piece. It stitches the forecast to the real-time. It gives a way to map the performance of every LoB, every queue, and every agent, in real time. It exhibits the number of agents busy, taking chats or idle. It helps in managing the floor.
TEAM
The product team was co-located in Bangalore. One designer, me, accompanied by a product owner, one architect, and 16 developers.
Users
The massive plus point of [24]7 was that the users sat in the same building and we had a very good access to them for user testing, feature roadmaps, product proposals, etc. For this product, there were about 12 core users, and multiple team leads who manage the floor. They were thus segmented into Workforce Planners, Schedulers, Real Time Managers (RTM), Team Leads (TL).
Product Management
This product saw the movement of product managers. Thus I was in turn responsible for the requirement gathering and product roadmap. A new product owner was assigned soon.
Design
The team consisted of 1 designer, me. There was a lead UI designer who would overlook all the UI decisions. A design manager overlooked the entire product line.
Development
There were about 16 developers of which 3-4 worked on the front-end development. They used to cycle between roles.
Design Research
[24]7 had a separate research wing that worked in tandem with the design team. The users being co-located, it was of utmost priority to leverage this benefit. I used to interface with the team of 4 designers for UX research and usability study in a fully functional usability lab. Researchers ranged from directorial designation to interns.
MY ROLE
This was a very interesting time as the product saw the transition of two owners. Me being the lead designer on it, overlooked the product roadmap in the interim period. This led me to gain the trust of the product management and the developers. This even lead to a point where the team started consulting design for product decisions.
CHALLENGES
Having talked about the transition of product owners, the onus on design was quite high. All the research work was pointing towards humanising the system functioning, while from an efficiency standpoint, the system needed to always run at its max capacity. Meaning, the agents needed to be the max amount of busy taking chats that they physically could, while the design had to contradict this behaviour of the intraday algorithm.
Process
RESEARCH
Finding the different workflows for different users was the first step to be researched.
ITERATIONS
Design iterations for the different users are demonstrated below.
A documentation of the module is in progress. Here is the UI with the interaction and flow.
Learnings
WHAT WENT RIGHT?
Frequent user involvement
Owing to Forecasting, this product within the Suite saw very frequent back and forth with the users. Every idea, feature was evaluated at early stages which drove in clarity of the product. Multiple tests too followed.
Availability of components
Since Forecasting was designed, most of the components were already developed and ready to use for Intraday. The design language too was set. Thus saving a lot of time and increasing consistency.
WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN DONE DIFFERENTLY?
Algorithm parameters
From a design standpoint, the parameters that evaluate the performance of each agent were too stringent and operating at a 'machine-level capacity'. This constant brimming of performance measures needed to account for a breather. Thus, contributing to the algorithm could have been influenced and done differently.
