Updating a professional services application

Concept Overview

OpenAir is a collection of applications that support the professional services delivery lifecycle. The platform includes applications to manage projects, resources, expenses, and timesheets. Fathom Consulting is a UX consulting firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota that has been using OpenAir for over 10 years. Fathom’s employees use OpenAir to create and track client and internal projects; create, fill, submit and approve timesheets; and create expense reports. 

Fathom employees were frustrated with OpenAir and its usability, however the company’s entire client history is housed in this application and transferring the data to another product is a daunting idea for them. Nor have they been able to find an alternative product that fits their business in all of the needed ways. 

Fathom requested a review of OpenAir’s UI in relation to their business needs with the view of making incremental changes to the application’s interface, to streamline their workflow and reduce pain points with common tasks.

Testing Protocol

First, I evaluated the application with a cognitive walkthrough of key tasks for Fathom staff. Videos of the login process, timesheet entry, new project set-up, assigning resources, reports function, and the expense report module were analyzed for clarity and efficiency.

Next, contextual interviews were completed with three of Fathom’s OpenAir users.

• A Fathom administrator who primarily uses OpenAir to track consultants’ time and view their availability to take on new projects. He also runs twice monthly payroll reports, and acts as the application expert within the company, often running reports for others and managing company log-in credentials.

• An office manager and event planner in the company. This user primarily uses OpenAir to track her time and fill out expense reports; however, during our interview, she was locked out of the program. 

• A project manager/senior consultant with Fathom who uses OpenAir to approve timesheets, run reports, create new projects and assign staff to them, and to create her own timesheets and expense reports.

Testing Goals

• Gain insight into the other tools and systems used and how integration might impact their workflow (e.g. time tracking)

• Investigate repeated or high frequency tasks and infrequent, or unused features, and the extent to which those impact a user's workflow

• Learn more about the type, frequency, and context of reports that are run, and how this might be improved

• Investigate resource allocation and project assignment

Test Results

Timesheet Entry

While much of the site is usable, if not elegant, the timesheet entering process seemed to create the most friction with staff in their ability to enter their own time in an efficient manner. The page used to enter time can’t be viewed fully on the screen, requiring the user to scroll horizontally to view the projects and all the days of the week. The most common error in time recording is assigning hours to the wrong project, which could be attributed to not being able to view the entire form at once.

Opportunity

The primary pain point seems to be the entering of timesheets for billable and non-billable hours. Many employees at Fathom use TimeCamp, an application that runs in the background of their computers throughout the day, allowing the user to create reports that give a detailed recounting of their time throughout the day. An option to allow employees to upload their TimeCamp reports into OpenAir would save time and reduce timesheet errors. 

Once a user has run their daily or weekly TimeCamp report they could export it as a .CSV file. Users would then have the option to upload that report into OpenAir and match the fields with existing projects in the application and each day of the pay period. 

Report Building

The reporting function of the application, while not difficult to complete, is not optimized to fit with Fathom’s needs. There are many filters and fields that are unused in the everyday reporting process, and information to complete and interpret reports needs to either be held in the user’s memory or copied and pasted from another application.

Opportunity

The application has a depth of options for customizing and adding detail to projects that Fathom users either don’t understand or don’t find useful. Project Managers and Consultants have created workarounds and shortcuts to pull reports by cloning old reports and not completing any unnecessary fields. This has resulted in a lot of wasteful scrolling and a cluttered UI. Adjusting Fathom’s OpenAir defaults for reports would streamline the process and could add functionality to their reporting process. 

When a project manager or administrator wants to run a report, they would choose the elements/filters they want to include on a report from a dropdown menu with items such as project name, employees, hours, and budget, and then enter details for only that information before saving or running the report. 

Findings and Recommendations

After deciding to focus on time entry and report building, I built prototypes of the task flows, eliminating unused drop downs and filters, and allowing uploads. View the interactive tour here: OpenAir Update Flows

Project Outcome

After analyzing Fathom’s current OpenAir implementation, it became clear that the organization would benefit from 1) a way to upload CSV files from external applications or spreadsheets, and 2) a streamlined interface free from unused filters. As the result of these enhancements, Fathom employees can more easily and more frequently upload their timesheets. This will eliminate time-consuming mistakes. These enhancements also make it easier for employees to produce the reports they need to track their projects and resources.