BrightHR: Quick Actions

Background

Allowing faster completion of core HR tasks with less friction.

Problem and analysis

User journey data had highlighted that the most common task performed by employess was requesting time off. This was the most common action performed on BrightHR. The journey was clunky, first requiring that a user navigate to their own profile page, and use the "Request time off" button. Beyond that, the user had to fill in the resulting form and whole task took, on average, a whopping 2 minutes 11 seconds to complete!

This was a big collective waste of our users time.

MVP

It was suggested that simply adding a "Request time off" button in the global header could be a quick and neat solution; an MVP for some low-hanging fruit. However, upon analysing the time-to-complete metrics for all of the additional core tasks (adding documents, adding teams, adding shifts, etc), we soon realised that a larger solution was needed to address these time draining activities as a whole.

Bottlenecks: Identifying the "time sponges"

Direct user observations and analytics told us that large portion of the time lost to these common tasks – adding absences, creating a new shift, etc – were taken up by having to route via the Employee Hub page and find the relevant employee before initiating the appropriate task or function.

Typical core task breakdown (pre-optimisation)

1. From the home page, navigate to the employee hub section, a listing page showing all employees.

2. Find the relevant employee and view their profile page.

3. Click "Add absence" from the employee's profile page.

4. Fill in the appropriate details in the add absence form (type of absence, dates, times, comments, etc) and submit the data.

5. Repeat for any other employees.

The above steps were performed by managers approximately 2,367 time per day, with an average of 2 minutes and 11 seconds for task completion. This is a significant time sink. Further more, some users simply dropped out of the journey funnel entirely.

Optimisation

Several other key tasks also had similar touch points. Identifying these commonalities gave me the idea of the Quick Tasks and Employee Picker components, a user interface that would allow the user to skip several early stages from their journeys.

• Author a new component – an employee picker – and embed it directly into the final form. This allows users to skip several precursor steps, shortcutting the journey.

• Create a "Quick Tasks" button –  which triggers a menu of all common tasks – positioned in a prominent, permanent spot within the global header. This is the common entry point for all new tasks.

• Optimise the forms to smarter defaults to minimise form interactions.

Results

After introduction of the "Quick Actions" button, average "Add absence" task completion rates dropped from 2 min 11 sec to 1 min 19 sec . Considering 2,367 actions were performed, this has saved our users a cumulative total of 34 hours, 11 min and 23 sec, a significant saving.

Future iterations

As BrightHR looks to develop more features, opportunities to incorporate them into the "Quick Actions" menu will be considered, improving the user efficiency further, overall satisfaction and customer retention.

Later, the opportunity arose to highlight certain functions that were as-yet unavailable to lower-tier package users, giving glimpses to upgrade paths. Functions available to higher-level packages marked with a "PREMIUM" label.