Staff Scheduler
The Staff Scheduler App provides animal shelter staff an efficient way to view their work schedules and eliminates the hassle of finding shift coverage when unexpected life events come up.
Project Overview
The Problem:
Shelter managers and supervisors are often pulled away from their responsibilities to assist employees with last minute schedule changes. These unscheduled interruptions cause a break in their workflow and added up to several hours of lost work per week.
The Goal:
Design an app giving County Animal Shelter staff an easy way to view their schedule and find coverage without needing a manager to intervene.
Project Duration:
August 2022 – November 2022
My Role:
UX researcher and designer from conception to delivery
Responsibilities:
- Conducting interviews
- Researching competitors
- Paper and digital wireframes
- Prototyping
- Conducting usability studies
- Iterating on designs
Tools:
- Figma
- Zoom
- Google Workspace
- Paper/Pencil
Understanding the User
Target users are those in a supervisory position with the responsibility of creating or maintaining a staff schedule. The first step of understanding their needs was to recruit and survey volunteers to learn about their current process, discover pain points, and empathize with their experiences.
After conducting surveys, I organized findings into empathy maps and discovered a major trend with supervisors becoming frustrated when they spent an unnecessary amount of time working on and editing staff schedules. This time adds up to several hours each week and ends up costing the company money.
I found three primary pain points working together to cause the frustrations:
Persona:
Problem Statement:
Elliott is an internship coordinator who needs a streamlined way to make schedule changes because it is a time consuming process that takes away from his mentorship responsibilities.
User Journey:
Goal:
Have an efficient way to make changes to staff schedules.
Ideas:
- Give staff responsibility to swap shifts themselves to eliminate need for supervisor completely
- Once central place to view shifts needing coverage
- Automatic edits when shifts change hands
- Notifications to staff and supervisor when changes are made
Starting the Design
Paper Wireframes:
I first sketched five iterations of each screen on paper to determine which elements were needed to address user pain points. I used stars to note my favorite elements in the sketches to use in the digital wireframe.
For the view schedule screen (pictured) I prioritized a simple calendar view so users could see their work days at a glance.
Digital Wireframes:
Usability Study (Round 1):
The low-fidelity prototype connected wireframes for testing.
Five moderated usability tests were conducted over Zoom. Participants followed prompts where they had to log in, view their schedule, and set up a shift to find coverage.
This round of testing discovered a few necessary design changes requiring me to iterate on the wireframes.
Updated Wireframes:
Usability Study (Round 2):
The updated wireframes were connected into a prototype and the previous methods of usability testing were used again this round, only now the prompts were to gain an understanding of the changes.
The results show 100% of participants were able to complete the user flow without any major issues so I felt comfortable moving on to mockups.
The two areas found to need clarification were done at that time.
Refining the Design
Mockups:
Usability Testing (Final Round):
The high fidelity prototype underwent usability testing following the same procedures as the previous rounds.
Achieving the Goal:
It was concluded that the prototype met user needs from the previous studies while presenting intuitive user flows enabling staff members to view their schedule and find coverage for shifts they are no longer able to work.
Accessibility Considerations:
Impact
This app gives staff members the ability to take control of their own schedules. In return, managers and supervisors can get their time back since they longer have the scheduling interruptions regarding schedule changes.
With this app, users were able to post a shift to the notice board in less than 10 seconds for other employees to view and claim. The shelter can now use the time and money that is being saved by the app to invest back into the shelter.
Kristin Lucas – Updated 2025