A Project Management System

How it started

The client is a Real Estate company in Ho Chi Minh City. After we complete and put into use Human Resources Management (HRM) software for the company, the Investment Department has put the need for Project Management software for our Department to use, replacing the current project management software.

The reason is largely in the cumbersome reporting process, documents are distributed everywhere. When the overview report is coming, the Project Leader will collect and synthesize the reports of subordinates and then send them back to the Director. And so on multiplying with many different project groups, the report is piled up, inconsistent, leading to errors, if there is a problem occurring at any project stage, it must be when the total report is presented that the project leader will receive a notification so there will be no timely solutions.

Our goal is for the managers and the whole project team could have on the same page regarding the state, progress, and resources of the project. Besides, there is an equally important factor in the import file working in the current software the client is using into the new software, which requires the interface is not too complicated as the old software and ensures enough features for project management.

Challenges

As the only UX member of the team at the beginning, I was responsible for designing and testing the entire experience, from concept, interaction, visual design, and final product.

• The Gantt - Progress Manager UI in essence has quite a lot of information to display, but it is not always necessary to leave outside the main UI, so deciding to display and hide data columns and organize tools is challenging.
• In addition to managing the progress of work, the application needs to meet the view of payment progress (corresponding to each job - if any).
• The time to complete the project is quite tight, with urgent needs, customers want to experience after each feature is completed 80-90%.
• The UI UX expression needs to be clear, intuitive, remove the cumbersome operations when employees take the job and update the progress.

Solutions

• Gantt Interface - At first my team planned not to redraw gantt UI that shows all the work, because the Development team has taken advantage of an open source that supports gantt's performance quite smoothly, so I focus on building the design system skeleton for the entire design as well as collecting features requirements and interviewing users about inadequacies/advantages. While the current software.

- But after the first sprint released the gantt part, my team decided to invest optimally in this Gantt interface:
+ About space, the team has removed all unnecessary parts on this page such as: footer, title, reduced margin and padding, support full screen viewing.
+ Because we just want to see the overview but can still choose a certain job to see the details, the team chose the option to quickly view the work by entering the right panel, scale the gantt to the left.

• From experimenting with ideas, our team also learned how we could improve our original design. Thanks to each feature improvement and quick feedback from the customer's staff, our team has improved many things like gestures and made interactions simpler and more natural, such as automatically updating the job status "Completed" when the employee pulls the progress bar to 100%.
• Payment Progress: the initial idea that my team intends to do this part separate from the Working Progress, the advantages of this separation can be easy for technical processing, but it seems difficult for users to switch back and forth 2 pages, in nature may be different but the payment schedule will sometimes involve a group of jobs. At the same time, the development team reported that gantt open source was completely autonomous, so the team decided to combine both Work Progress and Payment Progress (Contract) into the same Gantt view, of course so that users are not too confused, by default gantt only shows the work and has room to turn on and off to see the whole contract. 😉

💡 UIUX solutions are often simple and easy to do, but to find that inherently simple solution, it requires product makers to know how to put themselves in other people's shoes, and have a sharp, profound flair. Empathy is something that every UX lesson says, but to apply it to products, only customers and users really teach us. Above all, the person who makes the product is the person who must have the material of life.