Schedule Manager

The challenge

Schedule Manager needed a new frequency setup experience covering daily, weekly, monthly, annual and audit recurrences, with internal and external variants.

The form was complex and the stakes were high: users had to set up recurring compliance checks correctly or risk missing regulatory obligations. There was no existing usability data to work from.

My role

I designed the frequency setup form and worked closely with our researcher on a moderated usability pilot of four participants across five tasks, using a think aloud protocol.

My focus was translating findings into decisions ready for the sprint, categorising issues by severity, and making sure every recommendation was either resolved in the designs or tracked for the main run.

Research: what it found

• Task 4, the audit schedule, scored 3.5 out of 5 for confidence, below the target of 4. Users were confused by the schedule type selector appearing before the relevant fields, which made the form feel incomplete if they chose the wrong option first.
• The wording for first, second and last day of the week confused two of the four users.
• A bug: deselecting an assignee hid the date and frequency fields, breaking the form state.
• Users could not tell schedule states apart.

“Are those the ones I need to complete today, or in progress?”

Define: the insight

The form relied on users choosing the right schedule type first. If they got it wrong, everything after it felt broken, so the answer was to gate the fields or reorder the flow.

Design: what I changed

• Added tooltips for key frequency fields and advanced options.
• Introduced an inline preview of the next run to reduce date uncertainty, for example 30 November, 31 December, 28 February.
• Flagged the assignee and field visibility bug for an immediate fix.
• Recommended gating schedule types by subscription role, with clear messaging when a type is unavailable.
• Proposed tab filters: Due Today, My Schedules, Audits and Internal.
• Clarified status labels with a small legend covering Upcoming, In Progress, Missed and Completed.

Outcome

• Findings fed straight into the sprint backlog with no delay between insight and action.
• Frequency designs were handed over with tooltip content, inline previews and annotated edge cases.
• The bug was flagged and resolved within the same sprint.
• The audit task was flagged for further validation in the main run with a defined success criterion.

Reflection

This project showed me how much of research value lives in the handover. Findings only matter if they reach the team as clear, prioritised, buildable decisions.