<aside> 📌 Attendance Module is a feature on Powerplay that helps track on site labor count, manhours and links them with tasks to give an idea to the on-site team of the progress. I worked on this as a part of 4 day sprint during my internship.

</aside>

Context

Construction projects rely heavily on manual labor. These construction workers are managed and paid on day to day basis. Their contractor is given the information about number of people required on site along with type of tasks at hand and accordingly people are sent and work is carried out.

Design Process

Understanding the Problem

The major problem with current working was there is no feedback loop. After information is conveyed to the vendor, no information actually reaches the office team of the project. They are completely blindsided with number of people actually reaching site, how many of them are working on which tasks and how many hours did they actually work. Lack of these information also hampers resource and tasks planning. Project managers don't have concrete data to base their further resource planning on which leads to delays in tasks.

Defining the problem:

Design a feature to complete the information loop of manual labor work on-site of construction projects.

Understanding the User

Ideation

After the insights from user research, we moved on to the ideation phase. We used question and answer type discussions to ideate on various aspects of the feature. The results of discussion were:

• Who will update the attendance data? It was the primary responsibility of the project engineer to update the data everyday as he is the one supervising the site, all tasks and is in direct contact of the workers working.
• What input fields are required and why? The major information required from the site was: 1. Count of people present on the site 2. Hours they worked for on a particular day, very important to calculate wages 3. Tasks they worked on and linking it with progress of that task on a particular day, to understand the resource requirements of each task 4. Who was their contractor, to know the point of contact in case of discrepancies

Wireframing

The first idea to show all attendance logs was using the timeline view. But, on testing it proved to be futile in many ways. Major drawback was it was difficult to prioritize information and if shown all the information it increased the amount of scrolling. Hence, the decision was made to use day wise cards with high level information visible.

After user clicked on card of a particular day, he was directed to a screen with vendor wise breakdown of the manpower at the site. But in the first iteration, it was difficult to go back and forth between nearby days which was quite often the use case, hence, a calendar scroll bar was introduced at the top to allowed easy changes.

Similar information architecture and flow was used in the desktop view of the feature too.