TSheets Mobile App

Project Summary

Intuit acquired TSheets, a time tracking application, in 2018. TSheets already had an application that allowed workers to clock in and out, and the owner to track their time. Intuit aimed to expand the application. Their goal was to allow small business owners or administrators to approve time cards. They also wanted to let them track their employees and record work-related expenses all in one place.

With these changes, Intuit hoped to generate more revenue from small businesses. These businesses would want to use this application. It would directly integrate with QuickBooks.

My role as Principal UX Researcher

As the lead UX researcher on this project, I was responsible for:

• Develop a research strategy to inform the product design. Show it to leadership for their approval.

• Competitive analysis was done with other companies that offer similar features that we wanted to add to our worker app.

• Worked with the head of marketing, the lead mobile engineer, and the main data analyst. We aimed to understand how many users were downloading TSheets as a time tracking app. We also analyzed how many were using it as a management app for small businesses.

• Identify the concerning trends. Dive deeper to understand the gaps. Design and recruit for a survey. Send out the survey to users who opted in to emails.

• Analyze survey data in order to gather feedback in 1 to 1 interviews with small business owners.

• Create a research plan. Then, gather feedback from the product manager. Get input from the UX designer, the content designer, and the lead engineer.

After the research plan is signed off by all parties, I created a screener to make sure we got the right users. I also created a discussion guide for our interviews. Additionally, I scheduled interviews and invited all co-workers involved in the project to observe.

• Conduct design sprints based on the feedback from the survey and the interviews to guide us to quickly design prototypes that could be used for concept testing.

• Create personas and user journeys for the 3 types of users we identified in the research.

• Conducted a gap analysis working with our data specialist and found where users were dropping off and at what percentage.

I represented the voice of the user in all strategy, planning, and research meetings.

My work was essential. It allowed the company to decide whether to invest in this feature. Alternatively, the company could allow it to continue as a worker app for time tracking.

The Challenge

Admins who had remote employees and wanted to keep track of where they were and how long they stayed on a job site could not find value in our app because the initial experience was designed for workers to clock in and out. Most of these admins were working alongside the crew and did not have time to “figure out” the app’s value.

The other challenge we had was letting our users know that this app was not free.  We could not put that in the app without paying Apple.  We needed to push our users to the desktop to sign up and pay for the feature.  We did this as an experiment. We were tasked with researching if having a paid app on Apple was worth the investment.

The Solution

The purpose of this feature was to open up another path that would provide more revenue to the company.  Research showed that mobile users will take less than a minute to decide if they want to use the app.  We needed to show value quickly and efficiently.  We took a three prong approach.  

The first approach was to understand the users’ goal. We added a goal card in the app. This allowed us to collect data on the most important goals for our users.

The second approach was get to value quickly, we implemented the worker accountability map first, as this was the most request feature from app feedback, surveys and interviews.

The third approach was get to success by showing key milestone actions such as inviting a worker.  We understood that this was the most important feature that retained users based on the data analysis we did on the app

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Multiple rounds of research interviews, surveys, design sprints and data analysis enabled us to release these features.

Our team did a comparison between Android and Apple mobile sign ups. Android allowed us to inform our users that this was a paid product. However, Apple did not allow us to do this.  Majority of our users were Apple users. We observed that Android users would go through the process. However, when it came to paying, they chose not to pay for the feature. It was not at the price point that they desired.

The Results

After our team explored in-app purchasing options and compared the data of users purchasing the app, our recommendation was to not invest in this feature.  The ROI was not feasible with the low number of subscribers and the amount Apple takes for having an app that is purchased in their app store.  We strongly believed that if users came in from the desktop and understood what they were paying for, we should offer the option of including an app in the different tiers of pricing.

After this research was done, the focus turned to enhancing the worker experience and adding features that allow the worker to see their paychecks, how much overtime they have, and request PTO from the app.