Teams for Frontline

For this project, I connected the broader redesign to decisions the team could act on—from defining requirements to scoping releases.

• Connected the workflow.
  I initiated a shared manager–worker journey that informed Shifts epics and other frontline teams’ designs.
• Helped prioritize the first release.
  Customer feedback led us to choose onboarding ahead of a calendar refresh with similar engineering effort.
• Carried design through technical constraints.
  I partnered with engineering to scope Excel import while preserving essential feedback for users.

Frontline managers spent hours managing schedules across disconnected views. They switched between teams to check requests, assembled filters to understand staffing coverage, and handled much of the planning manually.

Getting started was another hurdle. Some customers created their own documentation or arranged training before employees could use the app.

Strengthen Shifts as part of Microsoft’s frontline offering by making scheduling easier to adopt and less manual to manage.

The immediate priority was to ship improvements addressing customer needs, alongside a broader vision for the manager experience. Each release needed to stand on its own and fit that longer-term direction.

My evaluation connected problems across user needs, features, interaction, interface, and visual design. The underlying issue was fragmentation: features supported individual tasks without connecting them into a coherent workflow.

Three priorities guided the redesign:

• Organize the experience around managers’ goals and context.
• Simplify schedule creation and provide guidance when needed.
• Use Teams patterns and platform components, reserving custom design for specific scheduling needs.

I initiated a journey-mapping effort because some gaps extended beyond the features our team owned.

Grounded it in research. I partnered with a researcher, combining new research with existing findings about frontline managers and workers.

Brought other designers along. We connected manager and worker perspectives, and I advocated for the map across frontline teams. The Walkie Talkie designer used it to inform her feature work.

Connected findings to planning. I worked with PM to translate the resulting jobs to be done into Shifts epics.

My initial design introduced the app through a sequence of instructional steps. Customer feedback challenged that approach: people were unlikely to remember instructions before they needed to use a feature.

I revised the design to minimize initial input and introduce guidance as users navigated to relevant features. I also designed a Learning Center as part of the broader experience, giving users somewhere to return for support.

The home view brought team schedules, pending requests, and key information together. Managers could get an overview without opening each schedule individually.

Within a schedule, I brought related controls closer to the work:

• Clearer navigation for switching between teams.
• Consolidated filters for finding the relevant view.
• A schedule-management panel for status, setup, and actions.

Across the vision, I used Teams patterns and platform components wherever possible, retaining custom components where scheduling required them.

The insights vision brought working hours, attendance, and staffing trends into a reporting view, with filtering and export options.

I also explored AI-assisted suggestions within schedule management, using the app’s data to support planning. The wider journey extended into sharing schedules and shift information with workers through Teams.

These capabilities remained vision work during my time on the project.