2022: Projector PSA Resource Scheduling Research & Redesign
Background
During my time as Projector PSA’s UX Lead, I partnered with a fellow designer to conduct research and design new concepts to address many usability issues in Projector’s Resource Scheduling tool. Projector PSA is a professional services automation software (acquired by BigTime Software in 2022) specializing in financial and project management, and resource scheduling for small, mid-size, and enterprise businesses. The primary user we were designing for was a project manager or a scheduler responsible for managing resources and roles on projects.
Research
My UX Design partner and I did extensive research to prepare for this project, including:
Feature Audit: I always love to begin a redesign project by doing a thorough audit of the current functionality. I gather screenshots of each step or screen, and take notes on any obvious UX issues and bugs to identify the “easy wins”;
Client Survey: We sent a survey to clients asking questions about their process for scheduling, and their use of the existing feature;
Internal Stakeholder Discovery Sessions: We held discovery sessions on Zoom with account managers to discuss common usability concerns with the existing feature, and learn about users’ needs from internal staff that spent the most time assisting our users when using this tool. We also attended sales calls with potential clients, and implored about their scheduling needs. We organized our findings in an affinity map, and presented them to our product and development teams;
Competitive Analysis: We researched other scheduling software, and compared popular features by gathering screenshots and watching their online tutorials to learn about their functionality and capabilities;
User Flow: A brief user flow map was created based on feedback from our internal stakeholders;
“Best Practices” Research: We combed online UX resources like the Nielsen Norman Group to better understand industry best practices.
Project Management
This particular feature had a long history of usability concerns. We combed the Product Backlog and Support Requests for tickets related to this feature, and began identifying commonalities and prioritizing high-impact bugs and challenges to redesign. We devised a timeline and prioritized user testing and design iterations.
Designs
We began exploring redesign concepts in Figma for the highest priority features.
Conclusion
We were eventually pulled away from this project and reallocated our time to other higher priority projects. Regardless, the breadth of our work speaks for itself, and it was a positive experience in UX research and collaboration.
