Bad Designs on Campus - Submission
A Waste of Time! ---Plant Operations Time Reporting Software
Problem description: Plant Operations- the folks that “Make Blue Go” on campus by keeping all of the buildings, facilities, and grounds on
campus up to par are stuck reporting what they do on an archaic piece of software that couldn’t be less user friendly-
Facility Focus. Anytime a Plant employee works on a work request, it has to be recorded for billing and tracking
purposes, something that likely can’t be avoided. The amount of redundant work, as well as the poor user interface,
however, can and should be avoided. Below is a screen shot of what the plant employees have to do, for brevity we’ll
focus on this one task, but even getting to this task is a problem within itself, as it’s nested in non intuitive and poorly
labeled menus.
A large proportion of users, such as the one studied, are required to work on several different work requests throughout
the course of a day, therefore they have to re-enter the majority of this information anywhere from 1-10 times for each
different daily. When you look at the total costs for time entry, the ramifications of the design really stack up:
One Worker @ 25/hr * 35 minutes/day = $3,125 annually VS.
One Worker @ 25/hr * 10 minutes/day = $1,040 annually
A difference of $2,085 per worker per year!
Steps to enter time for ONE task.
1) Open new form
2) Enter date
3) Enter shop person (employee id)
4) Enter shop ID
5) Enter work request number
6) Enter phase
7) Enter hours worked on task
8) Enter work code
Optional steps
9) Enter Time type,
10) Enter Labor Class
11) Enter Description
Proposed solution: Specific Problems and Solutions in design:
Problem 1) Each user has to enter redundant information. Each time a new time entry is required, all the boxes in white are
left blank.
Solution: Have the program locally store which work requests this employee is working on, allowing
them to re-enter them with ease, and just change the hours worked per time spent on that work code.
Problem
2) If an error is made on the form, say a wrong work request number, upon submission the form clear and forces
the user to start from a blank form again.
Solution: Prompt user with error, and allow a chance to change information before clearing form
Problem
3) Even copying and pasting is a problem, the program’s right click menu doesn’t allow copying and pasting, so if a
user doesn’t know the Ctrl+V trick, they can’t even paste data!
Solution: Add Paste feature to right click menu!