The Request

Our customers had expressed for some time the need for timesheet tracking. This is something typically discouraged within an agile environment, but due to the demand we decided to work on a solution.

The Goal

We quickly discovered through interviews with the target user, devs and testers, that many already didn’t care for the thought of having to enter time. But, if they had to, they wanted it to be super easy and quick. Our goal was to enable them to do so, week to week, in just a couple of clicks.

We also had to consider the administrator view. The process here included being able evaluate and approve or deny time sheets for certain individuals within the system, as well as make it easy for those individuals to be located.

The Process

After defining the problem statement and goal, we evaluated feedback we’d already received from our customers on a discussion board called IdeaSpace. This included requests about the specific need as well as reasons why. We then spoke with some of those customers as well as others the Product team already knew had this need for initial discovery. My desire here was to verify that the problem we had defined was accurate and hopefully unearth any additional pain points, as well as understand how they were dealing with the lack of a timesheet process currently.

After initial discovery, I created wireframes and simple prototypes (Photoshop and InVision) which we tested with customers by having them complete a few simple tasks such as adding time, editing existing time and assigning time to specific work items.

Once we felt like we were on the right track (which included reviewing the feedback as a team and tweaking the prototypes, then further testing), we created a simple user-submitted timesheet interface which enabled customers to submit time within just a few minutes.

The Results