Lantum web allows NHS Rota Managers to oversee shifts, leave and swap requests for their department while the Lantum app allows clinicians to view their schedule on the go. When I began working at Lantum, we had collected a lot of feedback from clinicians asking for the app to show who they would be working with alongside their personal schedule.
I was given the brief to add a new feature to the existing app to surface this information to clinicians and to deliver it in three months.
The Problem
We highlighted the problem from the clinician perspective:
As a clinician I want to see who else is working so that I can make decisions about my day at work and my free time. Working as a clinician relies on teamwork and seeing who is covering which shift is essential for day to day operations.
The Solution
The MVP I developed included a new, distinct area on the app, accessed by a slider that sat above the clinicians existing schedule of shifts, so users could swipe between their schedule view and the ‘Who’s working’ view. The ‘Who’s working' view highlighted key information regarding their colleagues’ shifts including, date, time, shift type, and was displayed by date in a schedule format.
We also implemented a date picker and the ability to filter by departments, so users could find the key information they needed quicker, and with room to build out these filters further in the future. This was immediately appreciated by users and quickly became the most used page on the app.
Months after producing the MVP version of ‘Who’s working’ and we redesigned and implemented UI improvements to the page in response to some user requests. This redesign included a cleaner list view, horizontal scroll for labels instead of a drop down menu and streamlined filtering.
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Discover & Define
We needed a quick turnaround in creating this feature as it had been requested from multiple users. Many users were also using a competitor app alongside Lantum, which showed them who else was working with them on any given shift. This meant users were using two apps for slightly different needs, which we wanted to consolidate into the Lantum app and add more value.
We spoke to 5 clinicians in user interviews, some of the use cases identified for needing to see who's working were:
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I have a question and need to check who I can ask (or plan when to get help based on when a trusted senior colleague is available)
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I want to know who I’m working with as I want to mentally prepare if I don’t like the team on a specific day
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I want to know who I am handing a patient over to (and potentially work harder if I think the next person can’t handle all their tasks)
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I want to know who has looked after a specific task or patient before me
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I want to check how much support I have at work at a given day so I can plan my private activities around how tired I’m likely to be (based on how many / which colleagues are present)
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I want to see when specific people in my team are on
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I want to check who is working with me so I can arrange breaks or leaving early with them
Lantum’s aim was is to improve the quality of life of clinicians, tackling all these problems aligned with our business goals to bring more transparency and ease of use to the app whilst directly responding to user requests.
The problem was defined so I explored different design options which would:
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work with what we had already and not disrupt the app too much so we could deliver in a quick turnaround
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complement the existing UI
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provide all the key rota information
The existing app had two schedule views, one was a monthly overview and one was a vertical scroll schedule view presented by week. I wanted the new feature to work for both schedule views. I explored multiple different options, adding a view of who’s working as a a split screen on the main schedule, or as a part of individual shift view.
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After many different versions I chose a design which allowed the best view of the existing clinician schedule alongside who was working. We ran some unmodified testing within the company, to test if users could identify the interactions such as how to find who’s working, how to choose a date in the future and how to filter by site. The testing showed the basic flows were straightforward, and although there were some visual elements which could be polished, we would start delivering this MVP version, so users could view their schedule alongside their colleagues, and check by day using a slider component at the top of the screen.
Develop
Exploratory designs -
Displaying who is working by shift Splitting the diary screen
After my designs had been validated by users and iterations completed, I created a handoff document for developers featuring the specs for who’s working designs and a high fidelity prototype showcasing the interaction. This was followed by multiple refinement sessions with developers where I reviewed test links to check the designs were interactions. We then refined the designs some months later. Below shows the the end MVP version and some of the documented changes between this and the final version.
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Deliver
This was my first time working on a project which had a quick turnaround and for which we had to make an MVP we hoped to return to and improve later (which we did!).
This was also my first time working on an app and on the Lantum product so it was interesting learning to work with the team and manage expectations. I found it useful to offer the engineers multiple versions of the designs including:
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The ideal version that would take more engineering effort
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A 'good' version which would take less effort
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An MVP version that was workable as a first draft but not the finished product
I could then take all these to the engineers, see what they thought was possible in the time frame and work iteratively to achieve the final result.
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This feature became one of the most used pages on the app, the graph below shows the uptake in user activity of sessions on the app rising at the time we launched the first version of who's working in late 2022.
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Learnings
Impact
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