ATOM - Work Type Inheritance 2022 - Present
About Atom
Atom is a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) that provides an in-depth solution to managing assets, resources, data, and analytics in an easy-to-use application.
Project Overview
Atom is an Inventory and work management tool that helps the Department of Transportation and other organization to optimize complex workflows and efficiently track assets and workers in real time. This case study focuses on how our team optimizes the current work type template that allows users to create work orders. Besides the current work type, we added a concept of central management - Work type inheritance: Parent and child work types. A parent work type is a template to manage work type inheritance through child work types, which means users can easily customize and manage these templates in various uses.
Background
What is a work type template?
When creating a work type, users can determine the overall tasks required, the budget associated with individual tasks, what fields are required within a task, notifications/alerts tied to a task, QA/QC workflows, dates based on completion, time left to completion, alerts if it is not completed.
What is a work order?
Users can perform activities relative to a maintenance work order by identifying the work order type, the materials required, as well as easily communicate with their superior and/or other team members in terms of potential issues. Users are also notified if they leave an asset in real time.
Create Work Order
Work Type Template
Challenge
Challenge
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The current process of updating templates is manual, making it time-consuming and inefficient.
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The lack of centralized management for templates makes it difficult to effectively keep track of and manage them.
Research
Primary Use Case
Primary Use Case
There are 2 types of users who use the work portal - Admin and Technician. Admin is the users that create work type template and assign it to Technician. The technician is the users who create work order based on a different template.
Understand the Context and Users We Are Designing for
Admin
Pain Point
The existing workflow is hard to manage and update different work templates.
Goal
Create and manage work type templates easily
Technician
The existing workflow requests the user to manually update the fields
Customize these templates with inheritance sections in various uses.
Solution
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Retain the existing template creation flow and introduce a new parent vs child template structure"
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Implement a centralized management system for templates to reduce the time and effort required for management, such as a child type tab"
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Introduce the ability to update templates simultaneously to greatly reduce the workload"
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Implement a child work type feature that allows for inherited sections, which allows users to easily customize and manage templates in various uses"
Regular Work Type Template
UX Writing
To address the name of the hierarchy template, the Product Manager and I explored a couple of alternatives to describe:
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"Primary vs Secondary"
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"Top-level vs Subordinate"
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"Master vs Detail"
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"Superordinate vs Subordinate"
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"Hierarchical vs Subordinate"
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"Main vs Subsidiary"
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"Superior vs Inferior"
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"Dominant vs Dependent"
We Decide to choose the "Parent V.S Child" work type that best suits our needs and the audience we are addressing.
Work Type With Inheritance
Parent V.S. Child Work Type Template
Design
Main work flows
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Create Regular Work Type
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Create Work Type With Inheritance - Parent Work Type
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Create Work Type With Inheritance - Child Work Type (starts from the parent work type)
User Flow Diagrams
User Interface
Main Workflow 1: Create Regular Work Type
Main Workflow 2:Create Work Type With Inheritance - Parent Work Type
Main Workflow 3:Create Work Type With Inheritance - Child Work Type (starts from the parent work type)
Other Workflows: Create Child Work Type Button - Create Child Work Type Action
I have mapped out the different workflows on my figma for functional team collaboration.
Key Features
1. Manage Inheritance Settings
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Admin can decide sections that child work types must inherit by going to Child Work Type Settings. You should update this prior to publishing but you may unpublish the work type and make changes as long as it doesn't have children that are in use in Work.
2. Publish to syncup update at one click
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Work type must be published to be able to create child work types. You may unpublish this work type as long as its child work types are not in use.
3. Create a child work type. Review Inheritance Section
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Review sections that the parent determined must be inherited by the child, make additional selections if available and as needed, and further customize the child work type.
4. Review All Chid Work Type on Tab
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Work type must be published to be able to create child work types. You may unpublish this work type as long as its child work types are not in use.
Prototype
Create Work Type With Inheritance - Parent Work Type
Create Work Type With Inheritance - Child Work Type
NEXT STEP
Phase 1 - 🚧 Under QA
Phase 2 - 👩🏻💻 Research and Iteration
Monitor performance
Keep track of key metrics such as adoption rate, usage, and user feedback to determine the effectiveness of the feature and identify areas for improvement.
Conduct user research
Gather feedback from users to understand their needs and pain points, and gather feedback on the new feature to understand how it's being used and if it's meeting their needs.
Optimize and iterate
Based on the feedback and data collected, continue to optimize and iterate on the feature to improve its usability and performance.
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