Leave Management - aanchaling

An empathetic leave management system.

❗Disclaimer❗This was a hypothetical brief, I have no affiliation with Pause or Obvious in any form whatsoever.

Project Overview

Pause is a lightweight time-off management tool that prioritises employees, productivity and progress. It is all the things you'd expect leave management NOT to be: empathetic, seamless, and anti-burnout.

Don’t let things breakwhen your team takes a break.

My Role

This was hands on task of one day, where we started with talking about what Pause is and then understanding the existing Web Interface and focusing on making it an accessible to all through Mobile interface, having the same features out there.

Chapter 1: Discovery 💡

Started from discussing about what exactly does leave management does in an organisation. And why was Pause made in first place and how helpful it has been. We exchanged are thoughts on the tedious task of leave management in teams and how the workflow of a team is influenced by it. Pause is team-first, anti-burnout and pro-recharging. Pause is more than just a leave tracking tool. It’s a capacity planner, employee directory, and team communication enabler rolled into one.

What is Leave Management?

Leave management (a.k.a. time-off management) is the process of managing time-off requests — such as holidays, sick leave, vacation, emergencies, and parental leave — through a series of policies, guidelines, and rules that are specific to your business. Depending on organisation and their policies, either HR approves the leaves of individuals or the Home Manager. Thus the whole process requires

Approval Request

Request Approving/ Declining / Re-exchange

Informing the peers, Updating the calendars of the team

Updating the timesheet.

Chapter 2: Define

❶ I began with Problem Identification → Mapping out the whole Process.

Tedious Process While going through the whole process of applying the leave, waiting for approval or discussion or follow up with Manager/Approver it is quite a tedious task.

Burnout Sometimes, team members are overworked and have not taken an off in a while, and no one really have an eye on their burnout and possible crack ups.

Team is not informed about leaves Sometimes, this cause a lot of hustle. and project deadlines go up hanging.

❷ Listing out the major issues to be tackled → Understanding the problems faced and mapping the JOBS TO BE DONE

Thinking in perspective to the 2 major user bases, one are the employees putting out request for time off other is the manager or team approver who approves and looks after if any clashes or conflicts with same dates occur in a team, if so the project can be better planned.

Pause is more than just a leave tracking tool. It’s a capacity planner, employee directory, and team communication enabler rolled into one.

Finalising on to some of the major Jobs to be done to focus on.

1️⃣ Burnout alerts in case of long gaps between vacation days.

2️⃣ Have a holistic view while applying for a leave that who all from the team are on a leave around that time, so that team can take informed decisions beforehand.

3️⃣ Notified about the request sent and its status, with follow up facility.

❸ After that look at the issues to solve and → How?

And how these can be solved through the various features.

As taking time off is more than just one person going on vacation. Time off is a team planning problem.

I decided to understand the major features to focus upon.

3-click application processes and 1-click approval.

Burnout alerts in case of long gaps between vacation days.

Birthday, work anniversary and public holiday alerts.

✅

“To design and enhance an experience for the users to have holistic time-off management tool”

Chapter 3: UX Ideation

Thus exploring some initial ideas on basic layout and features to strongly focus on.

Chapter 4: Design

To start with the whole design was a part of few iterations and how to have an holistic approach on the whole Pause app as mobile interface.

I designed a simple onboarding flow with screens describing the offerings of apps: the basic functionality of the app. I also stated that it is a team focused app which helps in empathetic leave management and planning ahead.

Chapter 5: Engineering Handoff/Components

A very basic layout check on how the whole Hi-fidelity design mocks seen above are built up in Figma.

The Styleguide was created to have various variants.

System Colours

Style Typography

Components and Variants

Chapter 6. Learnings

The hands on white-boarding round helped to learn and gave me insights feedback on what and where I can improve on. Not only that it gave me a project to showcase here to you.

Few of the major learning while doing this project:

How does a product can help influence the tedious task in working teams.

This gave me insights to help manage my current team and leave workflow easier.

Need to work on the UI front for enhancement of the skill.

Have a great understanding on the design system and engineering hands off part.

Focusing on topic, one needs time to explore around the various possibilities out there and to jump across how to enhance the products.

Actually, End :P

Thanks for scrolling through this and reading out my carefully crafted as less as possible words and still sticking around. Let me know if there is something(s) that I could have done better and would love to hear your feedback.

You can reach out to me on Twitter | Instagram.

⟵ Previous Project

https://aanchaling.notion.site/WLTP-Insights-f2bc4c8cf54e4b499654bfb26d8d2eb2

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