cronolog
Simplified time-tracking for hybrid-remote companies
As the world moves to a from home culture, companies are embracing hybrid-remote work. This poses many challenges for companies with more traditional management styles; employee time-tracking being one of them.
Cronolog seeks to fill the gap created by the sudden need to document work hours for both remote and in-office employees concurrently, while still providing relevant information for old-school processes and keeping intrusivity at a minimum for the employee.
At a glance
Cronolog started as an internal tool for the Parque Tecnológico Itaipu Paraguay (PTI-PY) as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, as all employees needed to stay at home while continuing to report on compliance with work schedule due to requirements from legal and management.
The product was built by a small team with a startup mindset, in a fast-paced environment due to the time-sensitive nature of the project.
As of 2023, Cronolog is now being expanded to become a commercially available product to be offered as a SaaS --come back to this page for updates in the future.
My role
For this project I worked as a solo product designer, responsible for the entire design process including research, design, evaluation, and handoff.
Additionally, I was also responsible for the branding.
The background
PTI-PY is a nonprofit with multiple locations around Paraguay.
In 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic and following government-issued restrictions, all operations had to suddenly move to a remote format. This situation demanded a quick response to keep up with workplace legislation and management-related requirements.
One of the situations that came to the surface was the need for a time tracking tool, which up to that moment was being handled using biometric terminals with manual migration of data to the enterprise management software.
As a first approach, the company created a minimum viable product in the form of a mobile app to capture each employee's self-reported time and location, along with authentication via the company's single sign-on system and facial recognition technology to validate their identity.
Before the shift to remote-hybrid, attendance and time-tracking was handled using biometric terminals at PTI-PY.
The MVP was built in little to no time by a single developer with no explicit design efforts.
The problem
After the launch of the MVP, many issues started to arise. The help-desk team was receiving many calls every day regarding usability and technical issues.
Eventually the issues were so frequent that management decided to start from scratch, this time around being more deliberate about user-centered design.
From this, the following problem statement was crafted:
Problem statement
The company needs a tool to track employee work time that caters to both remote and on-site workers, the solution needs to be easy-to-use, scalable, affordable, and quick to roll out.
Initial research
Due to time constraints, it was not possible to conduct extensive research at this stage. Nevertheless, some research is better than no research at all, so the decision was made to rely on quick methods to gather information.
To kickstart the project, we executed a small number of work sessions with stakeholders from management, as well as interviews with help-desk personnel.
Work sessions with management
Since policies around attendance and time-tracking for traditional in-office workers were already in place, a good starting point was revising the documentation with staff from payroll and human resources.
Many of these policies were found to be directly transferable for remote workers, but some of them needed to be reworked and reimagined, especially with the nitty-gritty of edge scenarios.
Due to bureaucratic limitations, it would not be possible to wait around until those details in policy were finished, hence, the project needed to be carried on balancing the lack of definition with flexibility for future updates.
Work session in progress
Interviews with help-desk
Another valuable and quick source of information at this stage was the collective knowledge from the people working the help desk, given that they were already serving the users for the first MPV.
This activity took the form of quick water-cooler conversation type interviews (help-desk is always busy) focusing on the most common complaints the users had regarding the MVP.
The main issues identified were data privacy concerns and distrust of the facial recognition and location tracking technologies, as well as difficulties with navigating and completing tasks within the app, especially when it came to people with lesser tech experience.
Additionally, many people complained about how uncomfortable it was to open the camera and see oneself in the viewfinder. Some of them expressed that they felt this was too intimate for a corporate tool, while others argued they just didn't like to see themselves at all.
Location data was also causing trust issues, people complained about feeling tracked at all times, even when they were off work.
Heuristic evaluation
Although the product was going to be redesigned from scratch, a heuristic evaluation would provide with valuable insights to complement the findings from the interviews. The main goal was to gather information about the MVP that could help make sense of the complaints from users, aiming at avoiding carrying those issues to the new product.
Many issues were spotted with the evaluation, but the ones that shed the most light on the users' complaints were the following:
The lack of transparency about exactly when data was being collected and how was this happening likely contributed to user mistrust.
The camera viewfinder for the face recognition system was presenting a distorted image of the user's face. This, in addition to low picture quality in some front-facing cameras likely contributed to the discomfort reported by some users.
Information was poorly organized and visual hierarchy between elements was not clearly established. This is likely linked to some of the navigability-related user complaints.
Main findings from initial research:
Policies were not fully ready for the transition to a hybrid-remote model. Nevertheless, the team needed to do substantial progress on a tight schedule, posing a huge design challenge on flexibility vs. ambiguity of the experience.
Users were complaining about confusing information architecture.
People had a hard time trusting the current product, probably due to a lack of transparency about when data was being collected and how was it being used.
Early sketches for the product's core functionality
Design
In order to address the issues and barriers found through research, the new product had to take a clear stand on data privacy, policy transparency and information architecture.
Additionally, PTI-PY being a mid-sized company with around 200 employees, the people working at PTI-PY represents a fairly diverse group of individuals ranging from tech-savvy to less trained individuals, posing the challenge of designing for inclusivity.
Design implications
The product must be easy to use for people with a wide range of digital literacy levels (universality).
The product must allow control over data privacy and clearly convey management policies in a transparent and down-to-earth manner.
The product must leverage familiar mechanisms and current mental models to foster trust and reduce adoption friction.
Universality
Cronolog was designed with universality in mind; providing sufficient cues through icons and clear copy, while still including all the information that a more savvy user might need.
For a frequent task such as recording the end of a lunch break, the UI strategically uses iconography to reduce ambiguity without relying solely on text, which might be hard for some people to understand.
Transparency
Business processed and policies are intrinsically complex. By providing just the right amount of information within the context where it's needed, Cronolog reduces the cognitive load while empowering the user to make an informed decision.
When the user is trying to record time with an alternative method that requires approval from management, a pop-up lets them know about the process and the next steps.
Data privacy
Users should always be in control of what data is collected about them and how said data will be used. Chronology provides granular settings over the different data collection methods used within the app.
Users can now enable or disable specific data collection options.
Branding
Since this project was carried out by a small team with limited resources, the product name and branding were also one of my responsibilities. Although I am not a graphic designer, I was the only person on the team with some graphic design experience and I did my best to meet my team's needs.
The name is a play on the words chrónos, Greek for quantitative time, and log, as in recording something. Therefore Cronolog refers to the act of logging time.
Visually, the brand relays on sober colors, gravitating around shades of blue, inspired by established banking brands to convey trust and security. While contrasting this corporate feel with a playful, versatile, and highly legible Quicksand to provide a much-needed freshness to the brand.
Evaluation
The diverse audience of the product was also considered while designing the research activities for the evaluation phase.
A combination of In-person and remote usability tests were conducted. Considering the fact that a prominent portion of the users would have difficulties setting up the tech for remote testing, a select group of users underwent in-person sessions, while more tech-savvy participants enabled faster, cheaper, and easier-to-schedule remote sessions.
Among the main findings of the evaluations, we can mention the following:
Most of the problems found in the previous product version were addressed: All participants reported that the language used in the UI helped them understand the process clearly, iconography helped them quickly get a grip on context, navigability was easy to follow, and privacy concerns were significantly reduced with the inclusion of alternative authentication methods (as opposed to forcing users to use the camera).
Some of the problems proved to require stronger actions to be corrected, specifically issues around trust: Most participants expressed sentiments of mistrust about the purpose of the application and the use of data. This is likely a symptom of an organizational-level issue, nevertheless, this finding will be considered in future iterations of the product.
Some users found it hard to get a grip of their current tracked time scenario. A better, clearer way to convey the tracked hours over a defined period of time will be necessary, concurrently with features that are flexible enough to align with a variety of tracking schemes, models, and policies to cover all use cases.
Next steps
As previously mentioned, Cronolog is now being re-imagined as a commercial product. In this new iteration, starting with in-depth research, the goal is to design a set of tools that fits a more general public, with the flexibility to adapt to a wide variety of business rules and management policies at different companies, while maintaining a straightforward and simplified experience for employees and offering powerful and adaptable tools for management.