BrightHR: Quick Actions

Background

Time-to-completion on spefic tasks were a source of user frustration.

Problem and analysis

Feedback had highlighted that the most common task performed by employess (or by managers on their employees' behalf) was adding time off. This was the most common action performed on BrightHR. The journey was clunky; requiring users to navigate, via an intermediate "Employee Finder" page, to their respective profile page before interacting with the "Add time off" button. The resulting "Add time off" form takes time to complete and whole task took – on average – a whopping 2 minutes 11 seconds to complete!

Resisting MVP

A prominent "Add time off" button positioned within the global header, it was suggested, could solve this issue in a simple manner. However, upon analysing the time-to-complete metrics for other core tasks (adding documents, adding teams, adding shifts, etc). While considered a 'quick win', an "Add/request time off" button would not suffice for the other important tasks.

This MVP would only have solved a small sub-set of issues. Further analysis was needed.

Identifying the bottlenecks (aka "time sponges")

Direct user observations and analytics told us that large portion of the time lost to these common tasks – adding absences, creating a new shift, etc – were taken up by having to route via the Employee Hub page and find the relevant employee before initiating the appropriate task or function.

Typical core task breakdown (pre-optimisation)

From the home page, navigate to the employee hub section, a listing page showing all employees.
Find the relevant employee and view their profile page.
Click "Add absence" from the employee's profile page.
Fill in the appropriate details in the add absence form (type of absence, dates, times, comments, etc) and submit the data.
Repeat for any other employees.

The above steps were performed by managers approximately 2,367 time per day, with an average of 2 minutes and 11 seconds for task completion. This is a significant time sink. Further more, some users simply dropped out of the journey funnel entirely.

Optimisation: Quick action button and resulting menu which grants fast access to start common journeys and task flow, saving navigation time. However, you can also still begin a journey while in the appropriate section of the app, allowing users choices from where and how to being journeys.

Optimisation

Several other key tasks also had similar touch points. Identifying these commonalities gave me the idea of the Quick Tasks and Employee Picker components, a user interface that would allow the user to skip several early stages from their journeys.

Author a new component – an employee picker – and embed it directly into the final form. This allows users to skip several precursor steps, shortcutting the journey.
Create a "Quick Tasks" button – which triggers a menu of all common tasks – positioned in a prominent, permanent spot within the global header. This is the common entry point for all new tasks.
Optimise the forms to smarter defaults to minimise form interactions.

Results

After introduction of the "Quick Actions" button, average "Add absence" task completion rates dropped from 2 min 11 sec to 1 min 19 sec . Considering 2,367 actions were performed, this has saved our users a cumulative total of 34 hours, 11 min and 23 sec, a significant saving.

Improving forms: Add absence forms now have an employee selector embedded directly into them, removing the need for several pre-form steps and making the process significantly more efficient.

Future iterations

As BrightHR looks to develop more features, opportunities to incorporate them into the "Quick Actions" menu will be considered, improving the user efficiency further, overall satisfaction and customer retention.

Future iteration: Adding Quick Actions to other products such as Bright Safe, a health and safety focused product.

Later, the opportunity arose to highlight certain functions that were as-yet unavailable to lower-tier package users, giving glimpses to upgrade paths. Functions available to higher-level packages marked with a "PREMIUM" label.