Teams for Frontline
Reimagine frontline manager experience in Teams
Reimagined the Shifts app experience with a focus on journey-level user goals & context, established a UX strategy for a long-term experience improvements
Shifts is an app within the Microsoft Teams platform that helps frontline managers and workers manage their shift schedules.
In this project, I redesigned the user experience to better support users' core job-to-be-done (JTBD), create a more cohesive experience aligned with the broader Teams ecosystem, and ensure the interface scales through platform design system alignments.
Frontline managers typically spend 1–10 hours per week scheduling shifts.
They rely on the Shifts app to:
Through user feedback synthesis and heuristic evaluation, I identified key UX pain points and framed clear opportunities for design improvement.
I collaborated with my PM partner to analyze user feedback and identified common challenges, including:
I conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the user experience & categorized problems across all levels. I chose to prioritise the foundational issues to drive the most meaningful improvements.
With some simple analysis, we can see the problems are on different levels. I plan to address key problem of each level with a focus on solving the ones on foundational level.
Journey map was created to understand horizontal contextual insights into their workflows, goals, and pain points. and later used to influence planning & prioritisation
To understand the frontline experience holistically, I collaborated with a researcher and fellow designers to create journey map which revealed contextual insights into their workflows, goals, and pain points.
Below is a current-state journey map for both managers and frontline workers. Using these insights, I distilled key JTBDs that would anchor our feature requirements. Together with the PM, I defined high-level product requirements and identified priority scenarios for redesign.
I explored the design started from lo-fidelity flowcharts & wireframes to quickly define, align & get clarity on the design scope
I defined the scope from a few core JTBDs, and then through low-fidelity flowcharts and wireframes. These helped visualize all relevant user flows and enabled quick alignment with the PM on what to prioritize and what to backlog.
We tested early design concepts with customers to validate assumptions & gauge initial impressions to inform our planning.
Afterwards, based on user feedback, development cost, and business impact, the triad team agreed on a roadmap for implementation.
(There was quite some design refinements during iteration phase & trade-offs once we get into the implementation process, like you would have imagined!)
While further design & implementation is still ongoing, feedback from users and stakeholders strongly indicated the redesign met key user and business goals: