Date of Project:
November - December 2021
Role: User Researcher and & Lead Facilitator
Methods Used:
Moderated, in-person
Usability Testing
Deliverables:
Research Plan Doc, Moderator Guides, Insights presentation for Leadership Team
About the Project
Workrise makes it easier, faster, and safer to do business in energy by providing a network of vendors and highly skilled men and women to execute the fieldwork, thus ensuring that the biggest players in energy have the resources to get their jobs done.
When I joined the team, Workrise was focused on matching skilled workers within the construction, oil & gas, wind, and solar energy verticals, with my focus being on construction.
Our product team saw low worker engagement which resulted in a knowledge gap of when a worker needed their next job placement.
We’d be made aware of a worker’s need for their next job placement after our system flagged that they hadn’t submitted any time cards to payroll. The result was a 2-week lag between the time a worker’s job ended and when Workrise would be made aware of it, giving the worker 2 weeks to look elsewhere for their next job and ultimately churn.
A mobile app for daily time tracking was hypothesized to improve engagement, and therefore, facilitate gathering more worker data. This data helps Workrise better detect and predict when workers are in need of their next job placement, retain workers through redeployment, and collect work preferences, in turn, enhancing workers’ potential job matches.
Product Management conducted a Pilot Study with ~50 workers who have made the initial shift from paper to digital time entry. The additional move from weekly to daily time submission will be a major behavior shift for workers, so it must be incentivized.
As an incentive to record their time on a daily basis, workers in the Pilot Study will be offered a $50 cash bonus for use but the end goal is to provide workers with access to Daily Pay (same-day access to a portion of what they’ve earned that day). This incentive is new to the industry and would be a major differentiator for Workrise.
Goal & Objectives
Usability testing to evaluate how workers interact with the Daily Timekeeping function prior to the pilot launch would inform any necessary changes or updates to improve the experience and adoption of practicing daily time entry.
As the lead researcher on this project, I hosted a kickoff meeting with Product Design and Product Management to clearly define the following research objectives:
Evaluate UI Change from weekly to daily timekeeping (test with 5 workers currently using digital weekly timekeeping)
Are we clearly communicating that they still need weekly supervisor approval of time cards?
Evaluate the change in how workers receive their pay with Daily Pay
Uncover what would motivate or incentivize workers to engage with our app daily or even just more regularly?
What other ways can we get them to tell us their job is ending/ they want another one/ they left/ etc. (ideally before they need it) so we can line up another one before they have time to look elsewhere?
Also, address questions of rate and speed of pay
My Role
As a member of the Technology Committee, I was tasked with assisting in uncovering navigation usability issues on the org’s website & recommending improvements.
Utilizing OptimalWorkshop, I recruited participants who are unfamiliar with YLNI or the website’s architecture for a Tree Test of the current navigation.
A Tree Test (pictured) is an Information Architecture testing method for evaluating taxonomy and findability of information on a given website. This test evaluated how the site performs by asking participants to complete real-world tasks that a user may carry out by utilizing the site’s main navigation.
The results from the Tree Test of the current navigation provided insights that informed architecture updates (a new navigation), which was re-tested.
Methodology
Method Selection
In-person, moderated, 60-minute usability testing sessions were conducted on-site at a Workrise branch office with 10 participants (5 participants with and 5 without experience utilizing Workrise’s digital timekeeping web app).
Figma links to mockups of mobile experience were tested on an iPhone X. Sessions were live-streamed and recorded via Google Meet and an additional recording of interactions with the test phone was captured via an iPhone11.
Study Design
Pre-test questions gathering info about their current journey as a worker and experience with submitting their time sheets (days and hours they worked) either with Workrise or another company, and their mobile phone and app usage, habits and preferences.
Usability Evaluation: Daily Timekeeping Workflow
We tested 3 workflows using the Think Aloud Protocol, asking participants verbally communicate their thoughts/ questions/ actions as they compled our tasks. Between each workflow that was tested, I reset the prototype to the phone’s “homescreen” to simulate going to the app to complete each task specifically.
Flow #1: Navigating through the login/ setup screens, reviewing their time cards and entering vacation time/ days they did not work. Getting a sense of their attitudes toward geo-tracking for capturing time on site.
Flow #2: Walking through how participants would enter the time they worked that day (8.5 hours in this scenario) using our mobile app to submit their time for the week.
Flow #3: Interacting with a pop-up “ad” describing a new benefit offering called Daily Pay. We observed how participants interacted with this pop-up (if they tapped on it to learn more info or not), and their understanding of the educational info about the Daily Pay program offering.
What was crystal clear about these processes? What was confusing or unclear?