Schedule Manager

An integrated tool for managing product availability and scheduling for ticket sales and attendance.

The Schedule Manager interface showing a schedule's configuration in the fly-out panel.

Project summary

The client

ROLLER Software is a market-leading, SaaS product for the leisure industry, specialising in ticketing, guest management and sales.

What I did

One of the core services of ROLLER is creating products like tickets, party packages, and classes to sell to customers. To create these products, users must configure schedules which involves setting up dates, times and locations for when the product is available. The challenge was to simplify a common interface used for a variety of product types in venues as diverse as trampoline parks and museums.

Key results

  • 50% reduction in time required to manage schedules
  • +3 point increase in Customer Effort Score
services
UX research
Interface design
UX Design
Role

Lead Designer & Researcher

Duration

12 months

Project milestone #1

UX research

The research phase involved many tasks that were conducted to understand user needs, behaviours and existing pain points by gathering qualitative and quantitative data. We trawled through existing support tickets, interviewed customer support, held collaborative workshops with users, undertook rapid prototyping and user testing early on and synthesised results for the team to workshop and collaborate on iterations.

I facilitated collaborative workshops, both in-person and online, engaging diverse stakeholders across time zones to present UX artefacts, conduct user testing and and gather qualitative feedback.
Dovetail was used to synthesis findings from workshops and interviews and generate insights to present back to the team to prioritise tasks and brainstorm next steps.
Early wireframes explored numerous ways to reinvent the scheduling process.
User flows were continually iterated on and tested to ensure critical use cases were effective and intuitive. This included exploring flows to transition existing users to the updated model and onboarding new users.

‍

Testimonial
"Schedule admin time has decreased from about 30–45 mins to 15 mins for the majority of products"

—Jim Allen, Business Manager

project highlight

Domain deep dive

It was crucial to get a thorough understanding the existing use cases for schedules. This meant undergoing a deep dive into a wide range of business types from trampoline parks to museums to uncover the what the differences were in product configuration.

Businesses were using schedules in a wide variety of ways but some patterns emerged. Because of this deep dive, I was able to simplify schedules for the majority of users while at the same time ensuring the UI was sufficient for all use cases.

‍

Project milestone #2

Interface design

Users, particularly newcomers, were confused and frustrated with the complex process necessary to create and edit schedules. We wanted to ensure that the entire process was intuitive and saved time.

Central to the new approach was consolidating schedules into a single space. Previously, the session times for each product were nested inside that product's set up, necessitating a lot of navigating in and out of products. In this new paradigm, users had a centralised overview of all product availability and a single place to create and manage schedules.
Configuration of schedules was moved to a fly-out panel that lived alongside the calendar component. This allowed for an overview of dates during configuration. Schedules are grouped by product at the top level and users navigate schedules by drilling into each product.
The most substantial improvement in this phase was the addition of operating hours. This allowed venues to set times for each day of the week that would then be linked to individual schedules. This meant venues could very easily make bulk changes for all products being sold.
Along with operating hours, we added the functionality to set temporary hours that could be used for anything from holidays to scheduled maintenance. This meant venues could update schedules at a global level without having to edit every schedule individually.
project highlight

Championing usability

During development I discovered a design flaw that might cause users to make errors. User trust was crucial, yet fixing this issue meant making big changes to already completed work. I presented the team with three options: a quick win but with UX trade-offs; one that needed more work but improved UX; and a third with ideal UX but required significant work. I met with the team and we workshopped an solution that had better usability plus a negligible impact on development.

This underlines the importance of owning up to mistakes and offering pragmatic solutions. The project is more important than the individual.

Project milestone #3

Expanding functionality across the network

The ROLLER platform is used by very large, multi-venue businesses. This means that over 200 venues could share the same products and schedules. With current functionality this meant duplicating work many times over. The goal of this phase was to integrate schedules into the central HQ portal and allow users to perform bulk edits and sync changes across multiple venues.

New functionality was developed to allow users to make bulk changes across many venues. The challenge was to make this complex task intuitive. A lot of time was spent iterating user flows to ensure mistakes wouldn't be made by users during these crucial tasks.
project highlight

Re-evaluating priorities

As the deadline approached, it became clear the engineers were struggling to complete everything to a satisfactory level, so I made the decision to reprioritise tasks and focus only on what was crucial for the project's success.

Instead of leaving tasks incomplete, or complete but crudely implemented, we could meet the deadline without sacrificing quality and usability. We moved outstanding jobs to a phase two project that we could return to once the initial release was complete.

Results

This project was a lesson in understanding businesses unique requirements, team collaboration and humility. The updates were well received and I heard first-hand from users how pleased they were with the improvements.

50% reduction in time required to manage schedules

We were able to drastically reduce user's time by automating repetitive tasks, centralising schedules, and improving onboarding and intuitiveness, allowing users to focus on more demanding tasks.

+3 point increase in Customer Effort Score

In order to establish a baseline and ascertain the impact of the improvements on usability, we conducted user surveys both before and following launch. Across hundreds of businesses, the Customer Effort Score climbed by an average of three points.