Interface that enables operations team members to easily assign tasks to available agents.
GuestReady is a short-term rental company managing around two thousand properties across 14 cities. Task management is a core activity of GuestReady operations team.
There are 3 types of tasks – Check-in, Cleaning, and Maintenance. For each task a member of GuestReady internal operations team has to assign a task to an agent that is an external contractor — a person or a company.
Checking for availability of agents and calculating the distances between tasks was taking the most time of the operations team.
Research
User interviews and contextual inquiries
In addition to the user interviews with the members of operations team we ran remote contextual inquiries — spending time with users while they do their tasks and observing their behaviour.
We wanted to understand 3 key processes:
- Assigning a task from start to finish for each type of the task (check-in, maintenance, cleaning)
- Monitoring tasks – From task assignment until task completion
- Evaluation of completed task
The focus for this project was the task assignment, so we studied that process in detail and made workflow models for each task type.
The process that is visualised in the workflow model above has many steps, need plenty of different tools, and requires a lot of manual work.
The goal of this project was to make the task assignment process more efficient by having all the information centralised, automatically calculated and updated.
Wireframes and prototypes
We were exploring many solutions using wireframes, paper prototypes, sketch prototypes and finally a React app prototype before we started building the real app.
After many iterations and testing, the final UI was starting to take shape, we first created a Sketch prototype with fake data and then also a React prototype with a small sample of real data for further tests.
Visual Design
Start of the design system
This was the first big React project we worked on in GuestReady, and we used the benefit of component based framework to start our design system. We created all the components in Sketch and then later in React, using Storybook for the display of components.
Final product
Once we had the basic styles and components ready, putting it all together was nice and easy as far as the design is concerned. The implementation part obviously was far more complex and it took some time.
The agents can provide their availability through Android/iOS apps.
The distance between tasks by public transport is calculated with Google maps API and displayed in the map.
This solution made possible to offshore and centralize all operations, as the knowledge of the city and direct communication with agents was not required in order for tasks to be assigned.
