Leave Management Software

How this helped?

We have a cloud-based software wherein we can on any point of time login and check our leaves.
All the managers get emails and notifications as soon as any team mate applies any leave.
And the employees get an immediate notification and email as soon as the manager sends response to the leave either approve or reject.

Introduction

The firm used old school method of sending emails back and forth leave applications and approvals. Where it was difficult for the higher hierarchy and the HR’s to track the individual employee leaves. It was also tiresome for all the employees to keep a count of the taken and confirmed leaves and also differentiate various leaves.

Solutions

Dashboard for employee where they can view all their leaves. Leave related data, eg. total leaves(sick leave/casual leave), remaining leaves, approved,not approved, cancelled(by employee himself), pending approval, planned and unplanned.
Employee can apply for leaves in the same dashboard and get approvals.
Managers can view his entire teams leaves, making it easy for him to manage projects.
Manager should get popups and reminder emails of leaves applied by their team and if leave request was not responded for a period of time.
HR should be able to view all employees leaves
HR will be protected from the hassle of answering about the leaves to the employees.
An aid for the financial department to calculate paid leave of employee if any.

My Role

I Solely handled the entire UX process and UI Development.
Where in I did research and findings of the software that are available to be used. What these software avail and how easy are they to handle by a novice.
Persona gathering and making.
User flow diagram.
Story Boarding
Prototyping and wireframing.
User Testing
UI development involved on finding a calendar where in we can plot holidays and leaves so that it will be easy for the employees to find their monthly leaves.

Research & Findings

Companies had developed their individual software and the online software that were available for purchase needed the HR to fill in the data and apply settings.

What did the purchasable software's offered?

Cloud Based HRMS with Mobile apps
Employee
Onboarding to Exit
Flexible Attendance & Leave policies
Automated Payroll & Statutory Compliance
Flexible Authorization Workflow
Performance & Recruitment management
Expense & Reimbursements
And more

Why make our own

The main reason to make our own software was to make it more tangible to the companies needs and make changes to the process as an when needed and make the product easy to handle for all the users

Scope of my project

In the research we discovered a lot is possible to be created. But we wanted to serve the immediate need of the organization.
Considering this we decided on developing a Cloud based Leave Management System at first. This will by default allocate employees with their appropriate leaves. Employee can apply for leaves and the managers can grant approval from the system as well well as through links on emails. HR and admin could see all the employee leaves applied for their status and super admin could perform all the tasks.

User Research

We chalked out a plan where in we decided to understand the organizations policies and needs and as users employee needs

We planned on taking employee interviews to understand user needs. I with the stakeholder followed a selection process for whom to choose for the interviews.

Selection Criteria

Whether an employee is Local or Outstation.
If he is at Junior, Middle or Senior level.

In Total I took 7 interviews which covered all the above categories. Wherein we had top level managers, mid-level managers, junior employee and an HR so that we know different view-points.

Personas

Creating personas helps the designer to understand users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. They helped me understand different needs of different types of users and what exactly they wish to achieve from the product.

Pain Points

Interviewing users and creating personas helped me deduce pain points of the users. Frustrations of the users are the real pain points of my product, they showed me how current process was thwart and what exactly they expected from my new product. Different profile of users had different frustations

Employee

The emailing process was not a good method for leave management. As the request might get lost in the heap of other emails.
Very difficult to understand different types of leaves available and also leave policies, specially sandwich leaves.
Had to always consult HR to understand the policies
Have to check past salary slips to know the status of the leaves, remaining and taken of different types
Managers might miss some applications for the leave
Outstationed employee had to take bulk leaves and it was difficult to plan as the policies were not clear

Managers

Had to manually set up calendar for each employee so that it becomes easy to share with global team and also to plan the project seamlessly
Keeping record of all the requests arrived from the employee was very difficult
Application should also integrate attendance marking.
Provision for logging of work from home for employees

HR

Very difficult to get and then sort each employees leaves from the emails
Should be able to view each employee leave details as well as department wise details
Certain rules should also be applied for applying for leaves
Swap in and out should be integrated so that the system can automatically calculate the unplanned leaves taken by employee

Accounting

Should be able to view all employee leaves so as to calculate the accounts for paid leaves if any
Reports should be available

My Story Board

Story boarding is always a fun way of explaining the problem. I came up with the below story board which was appreciated by the stakeholders

User Flow

Along with the stakeholders we discussed on who should have what roles and access.

Every user would see his own dashboard once logged in. What leaves he or she have taken
They will also have a provision therein to apply the leave
If employee is a manager they can view their team members leave
Will also approve or reject their teams leaves
We also decided on giving a team view where in manager can view his teams leaves on 1 go
HR dashboard would act as an super user wherein they can view all the employees leaves

Process

Once the user flow was decided I made low fidelity sketches.

Low Fidelity Sketches

Different Design Approaches

Design Approach I

Colored Calendar and List

Here I had given more preference to the calendar view as it gave a precise data on what date and which type of leave is taken.

List view was visible once the tap is switched. In the list view as well i had colored the rows with the type of leave taken.

In this design I also had this in my mind that the Calendar should almost fill up the entire page and should be very huge and hence I had 2 positions for the application form.

In the second I gave the form on the right side of the page. As filling up of the forms and action buttons should be right positioned as most of the users are right handed and that gets convenient, you view you data on the starting of the page that is the left side and fill in the information on the right side.

Form on the right

Form on the top

Design Approach II

Everything can be full or hidden

In this design I had everything available on the sidebar where you can open 2 panels side by side or just 1 fully opened panel.

Depending on your priority you can decide your own view.

Design Approach III

Nothing is hidden

In this I made a dashboard where all the components were visible on the screen, nothing was hidden. Also used a graph to show the taken leaves in the form of column graph, which made it more appealing and understandable on how the taken leaves were divided.

If the person took more of emergency leaves or more planned leaves. This data was useful to the managers and to the users as well on controlling the types of leaves they take.

Final Selection

We selected the third design as it showed everything on the initial view itself and also was appealing.

Once the design was finalized, I had to make a team view, where the manager should see the leaves of his entire team or the employees he wants to view. We also decided on filling up the same dashboard with the employee data once the manager selected a particular team mate. Selecting of the team mate was provided in a drop-down. This drop-down also contained a search box where in the manager can type and search his team mates.

Additions

For the team view I suggested 2 designs to make the managers job easy

Design I

Table View

In this a row represented a particular team mate and the columns represented the days of a particular selected month. And different colors in the cell represented the type of leaves taken.

Design II

Calendar View