CompanyCam:
Task Management
MY ROLE
Designer leading this feature at CompanyCam
Responsible for end-to-end design from discovery to engineering support
WHY IS THIS NEEDED?
CompanyCam is an app for contractors to take photos of their job site progress, organize documents, and assign tasks. The app has a lot features that users can use to accomplish similar flows and many of our users find it overwhelming to find things in the product and accomplish their tasks.
Understanding the Problem Space
📋 This was an initiative that stakeholders wanted us to solution on, initially. We had a tight deadline to provide a solution, but the problem was: we didn’t know if task management was truly a problem for our customers
🔃 Because of tight timelines, I threw together some wireframes very quickly. These were dropped along with user stories and a user flow chart and presented internally. All of these ideas were based on pure assumptions
💬 I then led user research, where I spoke to 13 users about their experience with tasks on our app. I also used these calls to show them the wireframes to get their feedback. From these calls, we discovered that 👇
Contractors and their employees need to spend less time sifting through the app to understand their tasks so they can focus on completing their projects.
Key Problems to solve
Problem 1: Field workers at construction sites / job sites have a hard time knowing what they should be working on
Our current app has a lot of different places to go to complete very similar user goals. There’s no central place for field workers to look to understand what they need to do on a job site, what to-do lists they may need to check off.
The solution:
• Create a “My Task” or “Assigned to Me” module on the home screen of the app.
• Clicking into the module will take users to a page where they may view tasks by category. I.e., fix a crack in the drywall and upload a photo to show progress; complete a job site walkthrough checklist assigned to you inside the app
• Long term vision for this was to be able to add due dates, links to assets inside and outside the app, a centralized task management area
Problem 2: Admins / owners at these contractor companies need a way to view their own tasks, as well as tasks for people they manage.
Admins and owners are more likely to use the web version of our app, so on web, we wanted to create a more robust set of solutions: a dashboard type of home page as well as a centralized task management system, similar to mobile
The solutions:
• The home screen dashboard would be a place where admins could see what was assigned to them, as well as be able to customize the dashboard to view recent project conversations, activities, etc., as their role is to manage field workers among many other things
• The task management system on web would be more robust. It would allow users to be able to multi-select tasks, bulk assign them to field workers, for example.
What did our customers have to say about this?
🙌 This is incredible. The guys have actually been asking for something like this more specifically, like it helps them kind of prep for jobs. So this is they're gonna love this.
✅ I think this is functional. Very functional. Like my foreman, these are all his tasks and he can only see those tasks that he manages. And then that way he only has to worry about that little portfolio and then I could still oversee everything.
Where does this feature stand today?
Unfortunately, after conducting user interviews and receiving immensely positive feedback around these wireframes, our company went through a re-org. We no longer had the same people around, there was a leadership change, and our team was also pivoted to focus on a new initiative
Lessons
• Top down initiatives still need vetting, but there are cheap ways to do it. Our team struggled with this project at first because the direction was coming top down. This happens in the world of product building. We didn’t have a ton of say in what we wanted to work on, but I still wanted to validate this problem with our users. I thought that conducting user interviews with wireframes would be a quick way to do this. It was the only idea I had at the time, but that situation has driven me to research other cheap-ish ways to vet ideas, such as false door tests, embedded survey requests, vetting in NPS surveys that I hope to continue using.