The bulk time sheet displayed on a laptop

Iterating to $5 Million

How I ended a 4-year losing streak by winning big clients with a bulk timesheet

ROLE

UX Designer

DURATION

January 2024 - May 2024

BUSINESS

COLLABORATORS

Product Manager,
Director of Product Management,
Development team,
Architecture team,
User Assistance Writer
QA team

INTRO

Stock image of a resume held in a person's hands.

FIELDGLASS

an app for hiring, managing, and paying contractors, temporary workers, and service providers
stores and processes time sheets for users to record time and get paid

Business Goal: Fieldglass pursued a massive opportunity within asset-intensive industries to digitize operations such as time sheet processing.

stock image of a construction site worker used to illustrate a timekeeper. He wears a white helmet and is writing on an orange notepad.

timekeeper users

a field supervisor who manages hundreds of crew members, known as Resources in Fieldglass
responsible for monitoring and recording the quantity of time each Resource worked

User Goal: Ensures every Resource's hours are tracked daily for fast, accurate billing.

A 5-year PROBLEM

A sad, black and white photo of a man sitting on a disheveled mess of papers.

A timeline of Fieldglass's three attempts to win customers.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Timekeepers were plagued by burdensome and inefficient paper timesheets, while Fieldglass struggled to deliver a digital solution that satisfied customers.

limited research

contextual

These customers represent asset-intensive industries such as energy, mining, and oil & gas where massive workforces get contracted to carry out operations involving expensive equipment and machinery.

Product managers reported that timekeepers manually created time sheets by organizing their Resources into crews.

an AI-generated image of a large crew of workers overlooking a coal mine filled with tractors and excavators and other mining-related vehicles.

use case

A single timekeeper can manage up to 1,000 Resources, and each Resource can be responsible for a few deliverables ("Events" in Fieldglass terminology), which must be assigned a quantity of time.

diagram displaying the numerical relationship between a timekeeper and resources, and between resources and their assignments.

customer needs

Despite limited information, past feedback indicated that these customers expected the product to be:

consistent with SAP’s design system, Fiori

functionally simple

aesthetically clean

updating the solution

Since 2020, the solution had always been a bulk timesheet concept. However, the product managers wanted me to take the 2022 design and apply the new design system to it.

I told them that a new design system does not erase complexity, and I started from scratch.

initial user flow

For each day, the timekeeper would need to:

Set up the time sheets.
Select and organize Resources by their assignment.
Enter the amount of time each Resource worked on each assignment.

The product managers had informed me that customers organized "crews" of Resources.

I used this crew concept to create a step-by-step process where timekeepers could 1) organize their Resources based on who worked on what and 2) enter the time for each Resource.

A user flow diagram illustrating the bulk time sheet process in 3 steps: Setup, Crews, and Time Entry

establishing certainty

Step 1 of the bulk timesheet process where the timekeeper sets up the timesheet.

The first page was a straightforward design that aligned with Fieldglass' design pattern for forms that involve a Setup step.

a sequence of 6 modals that the timekeeper user steps through

For data and performance reasons, the timekeeper would need to step through a sequence of modals to select Resources and assign their project details. This is a typical pattern in the Fieldglass application when there are 100+ list items.

exploring the timesheet's display

I started sketching and mapping on paper how this bulk time sheet actually gets displayed.

first proposals

an exploratory concept where Resources are separated into cards based on their project details

In this card view, the time keeper could see all the different crews and their details simultaneously.

a split view concept where the user clicks on Crew on the left side and the right side lists the Resources part of that crew.

In this split view, the time keeper could focus on one crew at a time.

refinement

The developers said that form pages could not support a split-view nor a grid format. The panels would need to be stacked vertically.

Concept that takes the Card concept but removes the grid. Each card/panel is vertically stacked instead.

pivot

The product managers learned that the "crew" concept was invalid. Timekeepers were not organizing timesheets by grouping Resources, so the dissolution of separate crews resulted in a single table to contain all Resources.

an iteration of the bulk time sheet where step 2 contains one table to contain all workers because the crew concept was invalidated.

information re-architected

This pivot meant reversing the structure, so that each Resource would be attached to a string of work details.

breakthrough

I realized that this one table could cover both the task of adding workers with their project details and the task of entering their time. The steps were reduced from 3 to 2, resulting in a simpler user flow.

A user flow diagram updated to reduce the number of steps from 3 to 2.

demo day

With all the requirements satisfied and the design polished, the product managers presented the prototype to a major energy client who approved of the new bulk timesheet.

The launched design showing 2 steps instead of 3, where step 2 is a table where all the addition of Resources, work details, and time quantities is performed.

outcomes

5/5 clients

adopting the bulk timesheet

$10 billion

in annual transactions supported

$5 million

in quarterly revenue growth for Fieldglass in the summer of 2024

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