Timesheet and administrative softwares are often at the bottom end of every good usability evaluation. There are a few exception of course, but most of those tools are vertical on a specific task, most often timesheets, without all the other parts of the administrative tasks.
So, we decided to give it a try, and think a bit about the homepage of a great service that everyone would love to use. Good interaction, well explained items, simple tasks. In the initial discussion we figured out that since it’s the homepage for a service with different tools, the view will probably be focused on the dashboard, maybe profiled for the specific kind of user that is accessing it. For this DbyE we chose to focus on a standard user.
What should appear on that page? We think that a good starting point would be:
- Menu
- Message
- Timesheet view/link
- Expenses view/link
- Purchases view/link
- Account view/link
- Free resources view/link
- This week view
- Submit status of timesheets, expenses, etc.
As you can see it’s probably a bit too tailored on what we usually do here, but with the exception of maybe a few details, it shouldn’t be very different from the setup of any other company.
If you want to try this week’s example, do your design now (no more than 10 minutes, remember) and then go on reading.
It’s interesting to see that in this situation there were two very different approaches: some people built an application to see and do things (and secondarily find content), while some others built an informative website to find content (and secondarily do things).
The application group basically created a sort of timesheet application with the current week highlighted, like Google Spreadsheets, with all the other activities correlated to that. The assumption is that most of the tasks performed by a normal employee are related to a date and time, so starting with that view helps users understand what’s happening and when. The issue here is trying to find a good way to visualize all the information. A “week view” without too much chaos (think about an invoice created on a specific day, plus the current activities, plus the bookings, etc).
Alternatively the informative website group prepared a dashboard with links to information on how to do things with a vertical bar including specific existing tools. The page in this situation becomes helpful, trying to guide the user in all the activities that they want to perform. There are also dynamic elements in these solutions, like the ability to alter time scales (i.e week view) in order to know all the activities happening in a specific timeframe which could then lead to performing actions.
There were some common solutions:
- The message, updated by the administrator to give synthetic and useful information, can be collapsed.
- The text should be in human language across the site, not in some arcane tongue.
- The horizontal menu would be a better solution if tasks are groupable, with an overall agreement that it should be possible. In any case, the navigation should be clear and understandable. This is valid for every website, of course.
- The website should allow a wide view of the page since most tools require a lot of space: reports for example. That’s one of the reasons why the menu should be on top.
- All the common actions performed by the majority of users should be one-click.
It’s interesting to note that the preferred functions to be included with the exception of the most common activities, were actions performed often, but not often enough to be remembered.