Goals optimization

Goals Optimization

UI/UX Designer @ Trunk Tools

Trunk.tools is a productivity enhancement web application that allows construction workers to earn incentives by completing tasks offered by project managers. While we are offering more than just the Goals feature, this project is solely focused on how we can optimize the goal-creation process.

Who is Trunk Tools?

Trunk Tools is an innovative construction fintech startup solving the skilled labor shortage by enabling project leaders to increase workforce productivity, safety, and profitability by aligning incentives from top to bottom, encouraging efficiency, and positively motivating the workforce.

What are Goals?

You can see Goals as tasks workers must complete to earn bonuses on top of their hourly wage. Goal creators can be anyone, from project managers to team leaders. Based on the project deadline, goal creators break a more significant task into smaller tasks as goals and offer them to team leaders to accept or deny them for their team.

Once the team leader accepts a goal, the system will notify the workforce workers via SMS about the new goal. After the workforce completes the goal and is approved by the goal creators, the system will automatically initiate the bonuses instantly to each worker.

Problem

The Goals feature is the “flagship” offering for Trunk Tools today, yet the goal creation process is highly manual and provides limited functionality and flexibility to our customers. However, this problem does not directly limit customer adoption. Still, we expect and anticipate that it will eventually cause goal creators to become detractors if basic usability improvements are not implemented.

Based on the research and observation, the Goal feature has several limitations that make both goal CRUD operations and goal reporting difficult to manage, which creates friction for both goal creators and Trunk Tools internal team. The following items are in priority order in the context of Goals:

1. Editable goals: When goals are created, the goal creators cannot edit the details.

2. Goal creation workflow: When goal creators create a goal, they cannot create a team from the get-go. Instead, they must go to the People page to create a team before creating a goal.

3. Metadata: Currently, we have no metadata associated with goals, and our team needs to parse through the goal description to understand what types of goals customers are creating.

4. Goals details: Goal creators cannot add additional details, criteria, and supporting images or links due to how the description is the title of the goal.

5. Bulk create: Currently, goal creators can only create goals can only one by one. This will soon create new friction when goal creators create 10+ goals a day due to how they plan out what goals should be completed in advance.

6. Schedule goals: Goals cannot be scheduled in advance to be created later.

Success Metrics

1. Improve the goal-creation experience

2. Increase the number of goals created by the customer

Empowers the goal creators to create goals from more than just the Dashboard page

From the current experience, users can only create goals from the dashboard page, even though it should only provide a comprehensive overview of the Return on Investment for incorporating Trunk Tools into their workflow. We are at the stage in the business where we are adding more features to the trunk.tools to provide more value to our customers. As a result, we are continuously adding more things onto the Dashboard page when they are meant to be elsewhere.

Current experience and layout

This approach of displaying everything on the screen when users are not using certain features or functionality is unnecessary and makes the screen clustered. It also creates a usability problem: users can only create goals from the Dashboard page when the primary action users can make from trunk.tools is to create goals.

I proposed to remove the open goal/rewards entry form and use a primary action button to open the goal entry modal. This allows users to create goals regardless of which page they are currently on and reduces the information we already display on the screen.

Preliminary explorations for the goal creation flow. We used these early concepts to gather user feedback.

Making creating multiple goals at the same time easier

As we anticipated that bulk creation would be a critical problem for us to solve, I was tasked to design a bulk creation experience that allows users to import CSV/Excel files. Initially, we were introducing bulk creation for this release. Still, due to time and technical constraints, bulk creation will be launched for V2, along with the Goals page, goal scheduling feature, and the navigation system revamp. Through multiple iterations, the following user flow is what we are moving forward with for V1:

Create one goal from the get-go

We are designing a mobile-first experience in mind and avoiding users having to download an app for the current stage of our business. Thus, whether the users create one or multiple goals simultaneously, the experience must be easy to navigate and achieve such tasks on a small screen. I decided to utilize the entire page for bulk creation while reusing the single goal entry modal components to enable users to create and edit each goal.

Are goals planned already? Add them into the template we provided and import the data

I made two assumptions about how customers will use the bulk creation feature based on our learnings from the customers: 1) They may want to create multiple goals at once without planning it. 2) Depending on the customer’s working habits, some may plan what goal they need and create them all at once. Additionally, the pattern and mental model of the bulk creation feature can be utilized for future features we plan to implement, such as recommending goals to our customers.

Once a file is uploaded successfully, the system will automatically detect whether a goal has missing details. If a goal has missing details, an error indicator will appear, highlighting those needing additional information.

Next Steps

After goal creation V1 was launched, based on the qualitative and quantitative data, we found our customers are struggling when it comes to creating goals due to the following reasons:

The misunderstanding of the role incentives plays in improving the outcome.
Some customers don’t know how much money to spend on a goal.
Some customers don’t know what are the best goals to create for the workforce.

To solve this problem, we talked to each customer to understand and obtain documents that detail what work they intend to do to offer goal recommendations to them. Thus, we are prioritizing the goal recommendations feature before launching bulk creation. This will help us learn the type of goals they are creating and their planning/working habits to improve the goal-creation experience.