- Role
- Lead & Interaction Designer
- Company
- Sprout Solutions · HRIS
- Timeline
- 1 month
- Team
- 1 PM · 1 design · 1 eng
You know it's bad when your users start secretly building their own tools to avoid using yours.
That was the vibe from HR admins using our scheduling feature — if they were using it at all. Some stayed hours past their shift wrestling with the UI just to plan the next week. Others gave up and built Frankenstein spreadsheets that made more sense to them than our actual tool.
Like buying a fancy treadmill and using it as a clothes rack. So, what was going on?
Workforce planning, but make it a nightmare
Picture scheduling 100+ employees across every axis at once:
- Multiple companies
- Multiple work locations
- Multiple shift types — broken shifts, graveyard, and the “why are we open at this hour?” ones
Now do it every single week. Admins were drowning, and the tool was dragging them down instead of simplifying anything. For a team that says it makes work life easier, that was a hard pill to swallow.
Lead designer, part-time shift therapist
I led design and interaction for the overhaul, starting with deep-dive interviews and ideation sessions with the HR admins living this workflow every week. Two lines from those sessions set the whole brief:
I'm doing OT just to fix the schedule every week.
HR admin, client interview
It's easier if I don't use your product.
HR admin, client interview
If that doesn't make your inner designer shrivel up, nothing will.
We stopped designing for one messy Tuesday
We didn't want to patch things up. We wanted to future-proof it — enterprise-proof, even. So we asked one question:
What if we stopped designing for one admin's messy Tuesday, and started designing for an entire org's scheduling philosophy?
That led to three design moves.
Think reusable, not repetitive
Move one
Admins were creating the same shifts over and over. Midnight–8AM here, 2PM–11PM there — déjà vu with extra clicks. So: build a shift once, reuse it everywhere, and let other admins pull from the same set.
Shared shift libraries. Create once, use forever — or at least until someone retires.
Design for modularity and scale
Move two
Scheduling should feel like building with LEGO, not assembling flat-pack furniture. Reusable components, scalable logic, drag-and-drop ease that holds from a 20-person shop to a 5,000-headcount enterprise. That's where the Shift Builder came in.
Try it. Name a shift, set its rules, and share it with the org.
Shift Builder Form
Create your own shift based on your needs
Shift Details
Timeblock 1
Shift Duration: 9h
Break Duration: 1h 30m
From builder to everyone
Admins spend less time copy-pasting and more time managing. Everyone — managers to rank-and-file — gets shift visibility across every touchpoint. Simple on the surface; under the hood it's built for scale.
Designing for scale, not just screens
Once we understood how overwhelming workforce planning really was, the design pivoted: smarter bulk actions, far easier setup management, and an experience that stretched across genuinely complex scenarios.
The feature stopped being a time sink and started being a time saver. Admins started to breathe again. Some even smiled, I swear.
Defined before I touched pixels
The bar every design decision got measured against — each one mapped to a pain we heard in interviews.
Building a full week of shifts should take a coffee break, not an evening of overtime.
A shift one admin defines becomes a block any admin can drop in — no rebuilding the same graveyard shift for the hundredth time.
Make the product the easier path, and the Frankenstein Excel sheets quietly go away on their own.
The same flow has to feel light for a 20-person shop and hold up for 5,000 heads across companies and locations.
A shift created in the builder shows up correctly in the web app, mobile, employee profiles, and team calendars.
We designed it backwards
The “oh crap” moment
In the first version we made it easy to assign shifts to employees— but not the other way around. Turns out admins don't think that way. They start with a shift (9PM–6AM graveyard) and then work out who fits.
A genuine “oh crap” moment — and the best iteration prompt we got all month.
What I'd do differently
Zoom out further. We never interviewed manufacturing or healthcare, where shift planning gets genuinely wild. The lesson: don't assume one industry's chaos is another's norm. Design might be universal — workflows absolutely are not.
The win wasn't a prettier calendar. It was admins going home on time.
Build the shift once, share it with the org, and let the product be the easier path — so the shadow spreadsheets retire themselves.