🏆 7SHIFTS X BRAINSTATION HACKATHON WINNERS 🏆
It shouldn’t be this hard to schedule shifts.
Optimizing 7shifts' product to meet the needs of new clients.
Timeline
24 hours
My Team
UX Designers
Software Engineers
Data Scientists
My Role
UX Researcher
UX Designer
UI Designer
Meet the client
7shifts is a team management platform for hospitality professionals providing services from hiring, to scheduling to retention.
Here's the Problem
“Our current scheduling solution is not as effective for mid market clients with 200 - 300 employees.”
- 7shifts Representative
which leads us to the question…
How might we…?
How might we help mid-market restaurant managers schedule shifts more efficiently?
24 hours remain
🚨 The First Hour 🚨
I felt wary of delivering a solution-driven product.
Okay maybe it wasn’t as dramatic as depicted, but there were a lot of solutions, ideas and directions being discussed amongst the team.
So I proposed we put ourselves in the shoes of our users.
23 hours remain
👨💼 We Started a Restaurant! 👩💼
We decided to conduct an audit of the current process of creating schedules as if we were mid market restaurant managers with 200 - 300 employees.
Want to know what empathy looks like?
Want to feel like a mid-market manager creating their first schedule template?
Just let this GIF play 200 - 300 times
Adding just a few shifts makes you realize...
😩
This is going to take a while.
⏱ 18,000 seconds…
FIVE HOURS
That’s how long it would take to manually create my first schedule template for 200 shifts if everything went PERFECTLY. Realistically, a manager would need to also consider a number of other factors such as:
😵
There’s got to be a better way!
22 hours remain
What about an Onboarding Flow?
🍔
Dinner Break
17 hours remain
Midnight Sketching
We wanted to make sure wireframes would be ready for the software engineers in the morning in order to hit the ground running the next day. That meant that we were probably going to stay up a bit…
Onboarding Questions
Smart Template Output
😴
Dreaming about wireframes
10 hours remain
🌅 Time to wireframe and prototype
By morning, we had the wireframes ready for the developers, who got to work on coding and bringing our solution to life.
As we met up on campus in the morning, we were able to communicate our wireframes and prototype to our amazing software developers who did an amazing job coding in the time that we had! I was able to touch base with them often as they were building out our product!
🤝
0 hours remaining
Time to present!
Smart Templates
What does this mean for our mid-market managers?
Currently: 5+ hours
Proposed: 5 minutes
Reflecting after the fact…
Though challenging, it was a really satisfying experience to have to problem solve and make decisions while up against the clock!
At the end of all of this, I’m incredibly proud of Smart Templates, as it is a very viable and real solution to a real problem for a real business!
It was really cool to work cross-discipline as a team, especially getting to iterate and go back and forth with the software developers
