Employee Management Database — Design Challenge

This was a design challenge I took upon at the early start of 2022, to work through the process of solving a UX problem and addressing the challenges faced during the process. I relied on Artiom Dashinsky’s — Solving Product Design Exercises to work through this challenge, greatly helped simplify the initial hurdle of -Where do I start?

The challenge:

To provide an employee database showing the records of all employees currently working in the company along with providing the option to record details of new employees recently hired.

Tasks:

• Adding employee record.
• Viewing employee records.
• Categorization of records list for ease of viewing.
• Detailed information page for each employee.

Process:

The process kicked off with collating the answers to the four W’s — Why, What, Where, and Who to get to the How.

Four W’s

The second step was to prioritize the task list into primary, secondary, and tertiary components based on importance.

This was answered by asking a few questions regarding the current flow and process of the management system with some necessary additions.

Questions to be asked and answered (both by me)

Primary Task: Provide employee database+allow addition of employee.

Secondary task: Categorization of records for easy viewing.

Additional: Motivate the user to complete required tasks i.e. Action items.

1) Dashboard:

As the main entry point, the dashboard has two functions; Navigational and Informational.

Categorization of Dashboard

As I delved deeper, I also realized that the navigational option could be broken down into more categories apart from just the Departments.

Initial sketch of dashboard components

After this point, I took things up on Figma, to quickly sketch the initial versions of the screens including the dashboard.

Records(Primary)- Employee Card:

Card flip to show records of each employee

Records- Employee Information Screens:

The records section has four categories; which can be accessed directly from the dashboard or the employee’s information page.

An all-inclusive screen showing all details for an employee: General

An all-inclusive screen showing all details for an employee: Performance score

Categorization (Secondary):

Category: Department

Final Screen:

While this was supposed to be a lo-fi prototype showing the viewing of employee+adding of employee flow, I worked out a quick sketch of the dashboard and the card flip in a mid-fidelity version.

Dashboard showing records list

Employee ID card showing primary records

Final Thoughts:

• A sign-in and sign-up page would be recommended so that each member of the HR team or management has access to the records.
• The dashboard could have a records list in a categorized manner i.e ascending (old employees)/descending order (recently added).

As a short design challenge, I kept the focus on the process more than the screens; the next steps would involve creating a design system to create a high-fidelity prototype of the entire flow using the dashboard screen as a reference.