Tasking Mobile Application Redesign

A look into the work I did to totally redesign an in-store tasking app for the Home Depot associates.

Role - Lead UX designer

I was brought onto a product team that had the task of rewriting a legacy mobile application that associates who worked in the Home Depot relied on to complete time-sensitive crucial tasks.

I worked closely with my product manager and lead engineer to lay out a plan to identify the areas in which we needed to solve the biggest problems and how we could integrate these solutions into the updated application designs to test in store with associates.

Keep reading to view the exciting updated flow!

What we heard

The basic flow took users from a summary page with many data points flooding the page, to a department page with the summary of specific tasks called out, to the tasks page where users could “work” tasks in specific locations in that department.

From users, we heard a few major pain points about the legacy design, including:

  1. The inability to identify priority tasks quickly and easily to complete first.

  2. Extra mental work to remember specific settings that needed to be set on specific days (for reasons not known to most associates working these tasks).

  3. Difficulty in visualizing all of the places where the tasks needed to be done.

What we did

Pain Point #1 - The inability to identify priority tasks quickly and easily to complete first.

I worked with my lead engineer to determine how we could help call out where priority tasks were in the application. This was feasible for us, so we took time to work together to design a tag on each page where we could direct users to those departments and task types that were set as “priority”.

 

Pain Point #2 - Extra mental work to remember specific settings that needed to be set on specific days (for reasons not known to most associates working these tasks).

A solution I proposed was to automate that one specific setting so that on those specific days the users did not have to remember to complete an extra step before starting their tasks.

 

Pain Point #3 - Difficulty in visualizing all of the places where the tasks needed to be done.

I wanted to redesign this application so that any and all information associates needed was not hidden and could be viewed at a glance. This included where the locations were for each task. I decided to test out including them as a list that could be expanded and collapsed as opposed to the original design that held them all in a dropdown.

 

Why this matters

When I was learning about this application, I established a baseline Usability Metric for User Experience (UMUX-lite) score of 63 out of 100. By the time we piloted these updated designs to ~50 stores across the country, we gathered a new score of 85 out of 100.

A ~20 point increase in the score meant that the changes we made were seen to our users as big improvements, we met the requirements to allow users to complete their tasks, and we made it easier for associates to complete their tasks.