From stair to lift: why we moved to a task-centric approach for our workflow management system

Picture this: you’re touring the house of your dreams. Big spaces, large windows, two bathroom, three bedrooms, fireplace, terrace, nice neighbourhood, well served, all the shops, close to tube. The real deal.

Third floor, no lift.

Phase 1: Panic.

Phase 2: logic settles in. ‘I’m young. I hit the gym thrice a week, three flights of stairs won’t kill me. Plus, how many times a day will I actually take them? Once? Twice on a busy day? I can manage. This house is too good to let it go because I’m too lazy to walk up to the third floor.

Phase 3: you buy the house and move in (the movers doing the heavy lifting).

Phase 4: reality. 7am — you walk the dog: 3 flights down, 3 flights up. 8am — go to the office: 3 flights down. 19pm — you come back home: 3 flights up. You go to the gym: 3 flights down, 3 flights up. Dinner out? 3 flights down, 3 flights up. Grocery shopping? 3 flights down, 3 flights up. Cinema? 3 flights down, 3 flights up. You got the drill.

(Bear with me. This long metaphor on the housing market is almost over and will lead us somewhere, I swear).

3 flight of stairs don’t really prevent you from doing anything, but they really place a mental barrier in front of you: do I really need to buy the mayo for tonight? Can’t Max simply pee on the terrace? Do I like Andrea enough to go have a drink with him? Do I need a salary so bad that I have to face 3 flights of stairs every day? Ok, I’m exaggerating, but you know what I mean.

Wouldn’t a lift make life easier?

At Casavo we are pushing hard to scale up our business, and we need tools that lift our burdens for us (I told you it would have led somewhere).

(And yes, we trade in real estate).

Our day-to-day passes through our workflow management system, the tool we developed to handle all the operations involved in financing, buying, renovating, and selling a house (which are a lot) and that we named “Core System”. Here it is.

An endless sight of textboxes, blanks and fields to fill in. If you feel lost, don’t worry, we understand. And we got you.

We realized that our Core System wasn’t properly supporting us, so we began thinking on a new system that would, starting from the very people that interact daily with it.

Through user interviews we defined the mental model of our users, their mindset and approach to their job and technology (here’s an awesome piece about mental models by Jones, Natalie A., et al. “Mental Models: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis of Theory and Methods.” Ecology and Society, vol. 16, no. 1, 2011). A clear picture emerged: busy, buried in deadlines and continuously interrupted.

It was clear that our Core System had some issues from an UI standpoint, but with this new information a more substantial issue was identified in the UX. The system wasn’t supporting the user at all, simply presenting all the possible field to be filled and waiting for the user to act. This is cause to two main squanderings: the first relates to the cognitive energy wasted on looking for the right fields to fill and checking if anything was missing, which is linked to the second time waste. In a fast-paced environment of a start-up, it’s mandatory to maximize the impact of every single action. This entailed a radical change.

Starting from the mental map identified, we therefore designed a completely new system, one with our users at the centre. We drafted the conceptual model (head here to know more about conceptual models) we wanted to act on, namely the general framework through which features and functionalities of the system are presented to the user. This is the most abstract part of the design, where the perceptive language (interactions, messages between user and system, etc.) and the activity language (the ensemble of actions carried out by the user) are defined.

Maintaining the centrality of the final user, we decided to structure the conceptual model with a clear scope: develop a user interface focused on Perceived Affordances (if you want to discover more about Affordances and design, read this) that would stimulate the user and clarify the necessary tasks to perform and how to keep all the information up to date. In particular, we concentrated on the cognitive energies spent by our users, allowing them to interact with the system using only short-term memory, without needing extra mental work to rely on long-term memory. To achieve this, we built on what was demonstrated by Peterson & Peterson (Journal of Exp. Psychology, vol.58, no1, 1959) on the weight load supported by the Short Term Memory, of maximum 7 (+/-2) groups of information, thus strongly limiting the possible actions carried out simultaneously on the platform, guiding them through consequent steps. This minimizes the amount of energies spent on the execution of these tasks, leaving more room for all the other activities.

This streamlined process required to structure a task-centric interface, aligning all the actions needed to carry out a given job, in order to prompt our user with the necessary steps supporting them in prioritizing their job. We foresee an active communication from the system that will highlight what must be done before proceeding, and a network of automatisms to support proactivity and intra-teams dialog.

Let me introduce you to our new WORkflow Management System: Worms. (yes, 90s kids now full-grown gamers, I’m squinting at you). As you can see below, selected fields are shown, showing the users different levels of importance: what is necessary, what is elective and what will become mandatory (to progress in case they have that information at hand).

To wrap up, these phases for us have been fundamental:

a) Analysis of the present moment to understand the direction to follow with the product roadmap to better align with the company vision;

b) Definition of the status quo and the user interviews to improve the value brought to our internal clients;

c) From the information collected, drafting of the mental model of our users;

d) and the conceptual model built on it, to maximise the work of our team;

e) Finally, we began the development process to fast track the project together with the UX/UI and Tech teams.

In short, if you like the house, don’t let it go because there’s no lift; stairs — and a basic management systems — let you go where you need, step after step, textbox after textbox.

Still, improvements make your life easier. A lift brings you up, Worms brings you forward.