Lantum web allows Rota Managers to plan the rota for multiple clinicians and allow for the smooth running of their department. Whilst making suitable rotas, Rota Mangers and the Lantum Operations team need to add, assign, edit and delete shifts. Originally they had to make these edits individually shift by shift as there was no bulk edit functionality. We identified the need for bulk delete, bulk assign, bulk reassign and bulk add labels after consulting with multiple users of the product.
The Problem
One of the biggest pain points when editing rota is lack of bulk actions forcing the Lantum Operations team and Rota Managers to perform repetitive actions when making multiple changes to the draft rota.
The problem we are solving is to reduce repetition when editing a department rota so it reduces time and effort to complete the task.
The Solution
When I picked up the project, shift multi-selection and bulk delete has already been implemented. I took the project over and designed the bulk assign feature and ability to bulk select and edit labels on the shift selection. This implementation simplified the actions of our Operations team and Rota managers in building and editing rotas, cutting down hours of work improving the rota usability and efficiency.
It reduces repetitive actions (and the number of clicks) when editing multiple shifts to ultimately impact the speed to build rotas and time to onboard new clients.
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Discover & Define
As the bulk delete function on the rota was already in place when I took over the project, I wanted to work with what we already had on the product to reuse or add to existing components, so i built upon the current toolbar used for bulk delete.
This displays the existing functionality for assigning a shift to a clinician on the rota using the bulk action toolbar.
First the user enters multi-select mode via one shift, activates the toolbar at the bottom of the screen, chooses to bulk assign, picks a clinician from a drop down side bar, then confirms and assigns clinician.
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Feedback from the Operations team and Rota Managers identified the following as the most commonly occurring repetitive actions:
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Assigning a staff member to vacant shift
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Reassigning shift to another staff member
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Adding labels to shifts
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Changing the shift type
I added this functionality to the existing 'bulk actions toolbar' that would appear at the bottom of the page when the user clicked a shift into 'multi select mode' or used the shortcut of holding command whilst dragging the mouse across a selection of shifts.
Once we had defined what functionality we needed from the toolbar, I set out exploring the design ideas, starting with adding labels to shifts. Labels are pre-defined when the rota is built so we were working from a definitive list of labels which can be applied to any shifts in a bulk selection.
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On further discussion with our operations team, they stressed the importance of needing to edit shifts which already had labels assigned, which necessitated the need for multiple label states. I tried several iterations before I landed on the idea of a new component, the line checkbox state to show a label could be applied to some and not all shifts within the bulk selection, and if the user wanted that label applied to all, they could check the box again to do so. We would indicate the change by a live count next to the checkbox, clearly illustrating how the label would be applied after saving.
Develop
I delivered annotated in depth designs for a range of different bulk actions to shift states on the rota:
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Bulk assigning one clincian to multiple vacant shifts
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Bulk assigning one clincian to multiple published shifts
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Edit labels on published and unpublished shifts
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Bulk withdraw vacant shifts
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Bulk delete published shifts
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Throughout the implementation I had meetings with the engineers to discuss user flows in detail and test our different scenarios. We released this in stealth mode and tested it with our operations team, who highlighted any small bugs before we released to external users.
This work has increased productivity in our operations team and for our rota manager clients in building and managing their rotas. The assign function alone has resulted in a 90% reduction in time assigning shifts, as users can now edit multiple shifts at once instead of one by one.
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Deliver
Work with what you have: the engineers and product team rightfully wanted to work with what we had in the platform already, meaning building on the current bulk actions toolbar and using side drawer components which already existed in the platform to edit the shifts. The time frame of the project meant I needed to be resourceful with my solution and I knew using the existing artefacts would reduce time for engineering work. If given free reign I planned to make a more user friendly option but working within the boundaries of what the product could do and already had established was a good lesson in using what you've got.
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Talk to users as often as possible: The reason I was able to come up with an effective solution to editing labels in bulk select was because I had an in house set of users in our operations team who I could do ad hoc testing with on a regular bases, this feedback helped my work develop and meant I could iterate regularly.​​
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Learnings
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