Finding what employees need out of a company calendar
Diageo One Calendar
Overview:
The Diageo One Calendar was meant to be the one spot where the sales representatives could see all the initiatives happening across 30+ liquor brands. But what employees really need is the ability to focus on the initiatives and brands most relevant to them.
The Mission: Find what needs fixed in order for Diageo One Calendar to be a more focused and valuable tool
We first needed to find out how sales representatives were using the Diageo One Calendar. Does it have the capabilities that they need? What is stopping them from using it more? What does it need to be a valuable tool for their jobs?
The most important finding: for the calendar to be more usable, employees needed to be able to filter and focus on the brands and regions most relevant to them.
Deliverables
User Interviews
Heuristic Analysis
Wireframes
Visual Designs
Timeline
November 2020 - March 2021
My Role
Research, UX Design, Visual Design
Existing Application Experience
According to our user research, the Diageo One Calendar was not too far from working with some key updates.
Initially, I thought that the whole application needed to be scrapped and rebuilt. After talking with users, we found that the biggest complaint was that users could not effectively focus in on the information that was most important to them.
The filter and refinement functions needed to be optimized.
Existing Calendar Experience
Our Approach
We used a combination of user interviews and heuristic analysis to determine what needed to be done to improve Diageo One Calendar. First we found out how employees were currently using the app versus what they really needed from the app.
We looked at these findings through the lens of the heuristics of usability to better understand what was causing user’s frustrations with the current application and what it was doing well.
User Interviews
To undercover specific details and potential pain points, SGK conducted a combination of written surveys and video interviews with One Calendar users from varying areas within the organization.
Our users:
The users are busy Diageo employees. They know the information in One Calendar is important to their doing their jobs, so they are highly motivated to use the platform.
What they need:
A one-stop shop to find the information most relevant to their roles. In a digestible format. That is easy to share in a presentation or on its own.
Heuristic Analysis
User tasks
First we identified the three key tasks a user needs to be able to complete:
1. View Calendar Events—View the calendar to gain relevant and accurate information
2. Filter and Groupings—Use the filters and groupings to find specific information that is most relevant to specific needs
3. Export the Calendar—Export the calendar with only relevant information in a format that can easily be shared via presentation or email
Ranking System
We then evaluated the user’s ability to complete those tasks in the One Calendar against the 10 usability heuristics and ranked each finding from Positive - Catastrophic Issues.
Our Findings
From here we had a whole picture of how the One Calendar was working and what issues needed to be prioritized.
Catastrophic Issues
Users do not trust the information to be up-to-date and accurate.
Calendar Export is unusable as designed
Users cannot trust using filters and groupings to result in accurate information.
Major Issues
Redundant actions - Filters/groupings are cleared at the end of a session.
Easy to miss what filters are being applied.
Unclear labeling and no breadcrumb navigation
Excessive scrolling
Browser back button behaves unexpectedly
Minor Issues
Organization could be better
Labeling could be clearer
Very limited help documentation
Solutions
We need to build user’s confidence in the information provided in the application. They need to be able to find the information most relevant to them and be able to see how up-to-date that information is. We recommended updates to the application that solve the issues users faced.
Overhaul the filter system
The majority of the catastrophic and major issues could be solved by creating a filter system that worked more efficiently.
In order to make who app work for our users the filter needed several updates:
Keep filter always open for easier and quicker access.
Remember user’s filters until they are cleared so they do not need to enter filter options at the beginning of every use.
Clearly list the filters that are currently being applied.
2. Format for use in Excel
Initially, I felt that One Calendar should be reformatted to function similarly to other calendar applications, but user interviews revealed that users uploaded information from the calendar into Excel documents. Therefore the content needed to still be formatted in a way that it could easily be turned into a spreadsheet.
3. Improve tagging and keywords
Update tagging to include timestamps and where the information is coming from to build trust for the information provided
Visual Design
Because One Calendar is a part of an existing employee portal, minimal updates could be made to the visual design. It needed to maintain the same color palette and typography standards. However, we did make changes to things like margins and paddings in order to clean up the application visually.
Credits
Rebecca Smith
UX Designer
Todd Slutzky
Creative Director