Teams for Frontline

Reimagine frontline manager experience in Teams
Role:
Product Designer
Team
2 PMs, 9 ENGs
Timeline:
2024 Q1

Shifts is an app within the Microsoft Teams platform that helps frontline managers and workers manage their shift schedules.

In this project, I redesigned the user experience to better support users' core job-to-be-done (JTBD), create a more cohesive experience aligned with the broader Teams ecosystem, and ensure the interface scales through component reuse.

Shifts app in Teams ↗
Teams for frontline ↗

UX Pain-points

Through user feedback synthesis and heuristic evaluation, I identified key UX pain points and framed clear opportunities for design improvement.

I partnered with the PM to analyze user feedback and identified common challenges, including:

  • Lack of onboarding support for new users
  • High cognitive load when creating & viewing schedules
  • Fragmented experience not aligned with Teams UX standards

Analysis & approach

I conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the user experience and categorized problems across all levels. I chose to focus on foundational issues to drive the most meaningful improvements.

With some simple analysis, we can see the problems are on different levels. I plan to address key problem of each level with a focus on solving the ones on foundational level.

Three key UX focus areas guided the redesign:

Design deep-dive

Scenario based design with journey map

To understand the frontline experience holistically, I collaborated with a researcher and fellow designers to create journey map which revealed contextual insights into their workflows, goals, & pain-points.

This is a current-state journey map for both managers and frontline workers. Using these insights, I distilled key JTBDs that would anchor our feature requirements. Together with the PM, I defined high-level product requirements and identified priority scenarios for redesign.

Design Exploration & Scope Definition

I started to explore the design scope with lo-fidelity flowcharts & wireframes to quickly define & get clarity on the design scope

I began defining the scope through low-fidelity flowcharts and wireframes. These helped visualize all relevant user flows and enabled quick alignment with the PM on what to prioritize and what to backlog.

Validation & priotisation

We tested early design concepts with customers to validate assumptions & gauge initial impressions to inform our planning.

Based on user feedback, development cost, and business impact, the triad team agreed on a roadmap for implementation.

Solution overview
Redesigned onboarding experience
We introduced a redesigned onboarding flow. Feedback from new users (4/4) confirmed that it significantly reduced the learning curve for frontline managers.
USER JTBD
“I’m able to learn about shifts app and understand how it can help me & my frontline team to achieve more.”
Manage all shifts schedule easily with a better overview
A new dashboard provided clearer overviews across teams and timeframes. We also added smarter viewing options for streamlined access.
USER JTBD
“I should be able to customize the schedule to meet my requirements, such as viewing all time-offs per week to ensure they are within thresholds.”
Insights-Driven Management
Managers can now make data-informed decisions with improved visualizations of team performance and staffing trends.
USER JTBD

“I want to easily track my employee's shift hours/timesheet, and access consolidated performance data of my team to facilitate better planning for the future & reporting to corporate.”

Impact & feedback

While further design & implementation is still ongoing, feedback from users and stakeholders strongly indicated the redesign met key user and business goals:

  • New release (onboarding experience, shift creation) received positive feedback from all pilot users, highlighting a significantly faster learning curve
  • Frontline managers expressed that shift planning became “less overwhelming” and “more intuitive”
  • This work laid a strong foundation by creating design clarity, defining scope, and guiding prioritization. I've led & empowered other designers on the team for shaping the future improvements.
  • The solution sparked internal interest from partners from Teams who faces similar UX challenges

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