Goals

Unlike traditional home services companies where crews are fixed and travel to every job together, Forge has a unique operating model that involves a team with diverse skillset. Our project coordinators have to dynamically consider every job’s required skills, its location, and various other factors to optimize the team. The team use third party softwares, including Kustomer, Google Sheets, Service Titan and House Call Pro, to capture, plan, and schedule jobs.

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It was costly to sustain so many softwares and the restrictive APIs are costing the company a lot of valuable data.

Project coordinators are reporting the inefficient workflow resulting in delays between converting a lead to booking the job.

Project Complexities

Evolving Business

Forge is an early stage startup and business decisions can affect the product. I've worked closely with the product manager and development team to address a major business model change that happened only a few months before the intended launch date.

Scalability

I designed this platform understanding that it will evolve with the business through time. For every "MVP" solution, I also considered how a more comprehensive version might play out. It's a lot of weighing pros and cons, and identifying high impact solutions that will still be relevant with any major shifts.

Scope vs. Speed

There were many features that needed to be build for this product to be able to fully support the current workflow. I collaborated with the product manager and end users to prioritize the features and making sure we are focused on delivering on the most valuable features as quickly as possible.

Over a series of meetings and workshops, I understand and documented how the team handles leads and scheduling.

Research

I plan, led, and facilitated a series of interviews, focus groups, and meetings to understand the ideal workflow for the project coordinators who were in charge of customer service and scheduling.

Journey Mapping

We mapped out the core parts of the customer lead to job scheduling process together gain a shared understanding.

Workflow Deep Dive

I created a detailed documentation of the workflow and highlighted all the different software the team is using. This served as a blueprint on understanding which areas our platform needs to support.

Brainstorming Workshops

After having a clearer picture on the scheduling process, I planned deeper discussions around the ideal workflow. In this session we had the end users participate and share ideas.

Main Takeaways

Workflow Mismatch

Part of the reason why the process of scheduling takes so long is the fact that the software they are using are optimized for the traditional crew structure. The UI makes it difficult for our team to see the information they needed.

Redundancy

One major inefficiency in their current workflow is having to copy and paste the same information across multiple platforms. Any schedule changes will result in a trickle of updates in multiple places.

Scheduling Sandbox

The team uses a shared Google Sheets to manage their scheduling. This serves as a way for the whole team to get visibility on who is potentially available for a job before they add it to the confirmed schedule.

Variable Dependent

There are a large amount of variables the team needs to weigh before they can schedule a job. This includes knowing the crew member's skillset, their availability, their home locations, their vehicle's model, and the weather.

Iterations

Capacity View

One of the biggest pain points for scheduling is being able to see when certain pros are available to be scheduled. In this exploration, I tried to visualize a large amount of crew members' schedule by abstracting the day into small rectangles that reflects their availability.

Weekly View

In this version, I played around with focusing the capacity information in a week-by-week view. This also features a more traditional calendar view with drag and drop functionality to help with scheduling changes.

Daily View

This version focuses more on having more of an hourly granularity. I'm curious to know if the user wants this level of details for the calendar. This feels more familiar to how existing calendar apps work, but also compromises how much information the user can see at a glance.

Feedback Summary

Optimize for More Jobs

The project coordinators prefer being able to see more jobs and capacity information over granularity of the day. At this point in time, Forge had a majority of small service jobs, which means a pro can have upwards of 4-5 jobs on their calendar at once.

Individual Capacities

They like being able to see the capacity for each pro on a daily basis. More importantly, they want to know how many hours so they can figure out if they have availability for a full day's of work or a small job.

Job Information

While they liked the version where it focuses on the capacity, they noted that having some information about the job is helpful. For instance, they want to see the address so they can keep travel times short between jobs.

Solution Highlights

Context & Tasks

The schedule changes often, and the team needed a way to make updates quickly. I paired a collapsible side panel and the schedule view to allow the team to have a holistic view to complete their tasks with ease.

Accessible Info

The desktop environment allowed us to incorporate hover interactions for a more efficient workflow. Users can quickly access important details, like scheduling conflicts and team information, by simply hovering over relevant elements, eliminating the need for extra clicks or navigation.

Scalable

Every element, including the navigation structure, was thoughtfully considered. I made sure the elements can evolve overtime as needed.

The Results

Launched July 2022

The platform launched in 2022 and has been used to facilitate all jobs planning and scheduling in place of third party softwares.

25% Reduced Time

Post-launch, project coordinator estimated the platform saves them 2 hours each day compared to using their old workflow.

Analytics

The analytics we were able to capture from this platform helped leadership make critical business decisions, including their recent focus on HVAC.

Notes & Thoughts

I set the foundation of the Service Hub as the lead designer, and transitioned to overseeing the UX direction, managing a team of designers to evolve the product over time. The platform started with only a few core features and has since been refined countless times, including the addition of in-line editing, documents upload, and integrations with invoicing softwares.

Service Hub