Designing for Employee Tablet Use Cases
Tablet Introduction
We believe tablets can help employees improve their day-to-day workflows and support their customer-facing needs with a digital central nervous system, however, there are design considerations we’ve observed when designing employee tablet experiences. It’s important to make sure that choosing a tablet solution truly fills the gaps of the employee’s role. If not, it becomes an unnecessary artifact, or even a burden to an employees’ mobility.
Also check out my article about How to Design for Tablet Interfaces
Single Tasks
Our research has shown that when looking at everyday use of tablets, personal behaviors are carried over to workplace behaviors. Tablets are good for singular experiences paired with a single repetitive gesture. In other words, we gravitate toward performing simple tasks as opposed to complex ones. In the employee tablet experience, we shouldn’t expect a tablet to fulfill every employee task but rather have it focused to a specific task.
Need for efficiency
Companies often think tablets will allow employees to be more efficient, but the reality is many tablet experience are inefficient tools for employees that distract them from their primary focus: customers. The less time an employee spends on a tablet, the more time they get to dedicate their attention to a face-to-face service.
Some of the most groundbreaking use cases of tablets include point of sale systems like Square, Revel, and Clover that have revolutionized the way the restaurant and retail workers process payments and operate as a business. Square’s user experience is successful because it can do two tasks very well — inputting the purchased item, and accepting payment … in less than one minute. Digitizing the cash flow has become an effortless action that requires very little manual work for both the employee and the customer.
Tablets and Conversation
Tablet is a great way for employees to interact with customers because they can hold the device twice as far away as they would with a mobile device. This opens up physical space to communicate with a customer while still navigating through a task. Studies have shown that in a personal use case of a tablet, people hold the device at a distance of 40 cm, while when using a point of sale tablet on a counter, the preferred distance is at least double.
In Apple’s appointment check-in experience, the employee’s role is to check-in and /or create new appointments for customers with their tablets. The employee’s attention is divided between operating the schedule system and managing the customer’s expectations. To manage both at the same time, the tablet is an effective tool because buttons can be larger and the device can be held at arms length to better communicate with customers.
Tablet and Mobility
Although tablets are portable, they aren’t small enough to fit in pockets, and at most would require a harness to host the tablet as an extension of the body. For employees, this extra weight can hinder their mobility. When interviewing Toys R’ Us employees, a primary pain point was no access to product information while on the sales floor. When employees were given tablets to lookup products, the tablets were often abandoned because they needed both hands to assist customers and move around the store.
At Apple, employee mobility dictated the choice of the device. Employees who spend most of their time approaching customers were given mobile devices, while the check-in associates were given tablets because they had a fixed location.
Redefining Employee Roles with Tablets
Once we define where a tablet can play a pivotal role in a service, it almost always disrupts the existing roles in staffing. The way in which employees are staffed affects the types of tools they use, and vice versa. When implementing a new digital tool, think about the impacts on employees and changes that may need to occur.
For Hilton Hotels and Resorts, we wanted to design a new customer and employee experience where employees were empowered to leave behind their front desk and service their customers as soon as they walked in the door. This would require redefining new employee roles to fulfill this elevated experience.
Data Entry
Similarly, data entry is a huge part of an employee’s day-to-day interactions. We know that touch-screen hand-held devices have digital keyboards that limit screen real estate, so traditional data entry designs are difficult on tablet. For Hilton and J.P Morgan & Chase, the front desk agents and bankers relied heavily on entering customer’s information, so we designed a search system where auto-suggestion is used to pull a customer’s profile quickly to reduce data entry.
Privacy
Privacy is a reoccurring concern, especially dealing with sensitive information. Our research for our financial client revealed that customers were wary about their private information displayed on a tablet device in public, and they preferred to move into a private space instead. Even when tablets have good use cases for the employee, i.e. so they can stay active on the retail floor and operate tasks, the perception and risk of privacy for the customer needs to be considered.
Tablet as a Service
When stakeholders ask for a self-service tablet, we realized that across generation z to baby boomers, customers expect digital services to meet their needs remotely, but if they are in need of a service in person, presenting them a self-service tablet experience will disappoint them. We’ve seen companies across industries use tablets as a customer self-service tool, i.e. check-in systems, however, we have found that the best practice is to accompany the experience with human guidance. Tablets are good use cases for user groups who value efficiency and who prefer to interact digitally to get what they want. For others, it drives away engagement because it is a barrier from getting the attention they need. We want to challenge our stakeholders to see that the tablet is most affective when they are assisting employees to serve their customers.
