OVERVIEW

Shift Bidding is a mobile feature that lets employees trade, swap, or offer shifts, enhancing flexibility and convenience in industries with variable hours, and easing managerial tasks.

Approach and Deliverables

• Enhance Flexibility: Provide employees with the ability to easily manage their work schedules by trading or swapping shifts with minimal friction.

• Reduce Administrative Overhead: Decrease the time managers spend handling shift changes by automating and streamlining the process.

• Improve Employee Satisfaction: Increase job satisfaction by offering more control over work-life balance.

The Problem

Employees frequently face conflicts between shifts and personal commitments, causing frustration and inefficiency due to lengthy communication with managers and colleagues, while managers spend significant time handling shift changes and staffing.

THE PROCESS

The Double Diamond process in UX design is a way of tackling problems and coming up with solutions. It’s split into four phases, represented by two diamonds:

• Discover: This is all about understanding the problem. You dive deep, gather insights, and really get to know what the users need.

• Define: Here, you take all that information and narrow it down to clearly define the problem you’re trying to solve.

• Develop: With a clear problem defined, you start brainstorming and creating possible solutions.

• Deliver: Finally, you test and refine those solutions to make sure they work and meet the users’ needs.

KICK'N IT OFF

We interviewed 10 hourly workers that frequently swap, offer or trade shifts within their industry. We also interviewed 5 managers that have frequent employee changes to schedules.

User Interviews

Golden Nuggets

Employees: Expressed a need for a more streamlined process to swap or trade shifts, as current methods (e.g., messaging groups, manual approvals) are cumbersome and slow.

Managers: Highlighted the difficulty in keeping track of shift changes and ensuring adequate coverage, especially when last-minute changes occur.

INSIGHTS

Most users have a trusting relationship with some of their coworkers. Users would want to offer/trade with a certain coworker other than a pool of coworkers.

Most users would want to insert a personal message as to why they would want to offer thier shift, ie. family emergency, etc.

Users want to have a piece of mind where the request was in the process and have a way to revoke request if plans changed.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

Existing shift management apps provide basic features but often lack real-time notifications, transparency, and ease of use for both employees and managers.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

We created a problem statement to clearly define the user's core need or challenge, ensuring the team stays focused on solving the right problem throughout the design process.

How might we create a simple way for employees to offer, swap, or pick up shifts to reduce miscommunication and scheduling issues?

USER STORIES & MOSCOW METHOD

We created user stories that we used as our building blocks to form this feature.

From these user stories, we organized them using the MoSCoW method. The MoSCoW method is a prioritization technique used in UX to categorize features or requirements into four groups—Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won’t have—helping teams focus on what’s essential for delivering user value within constraints.

PERSONAS & USER JOURNEYS

To put a face (and name) for this feature, we created a persona of a person who would be using this feature.

User journey exercises to visualize the user's experience step-by-step, helping identify pain points, opportunities, and moments that matter in order to design more intuitive and effective solutions.

Emily is a 22-year-old part-time cashier at FreshMart Grocery and a community college student studying graphic design. Balancing work, school, and freelance gigs, she relies heavily on a mobile shift-swapping feature to manage her busy schedule. Tech-savvy and responsible, Emily frequently uses the app to offer shifts around exams or project deadlines, appreciating how it simplifies coordination without group texts. She values flexibility, often checks the app for updates, and prefers in-app messaging for quick responses. While she finds the feature helpful, she wishes it offered better visibility into coworkers’ availability to make swapping even easier.

IDEATION PHASE

My ideation process involves whiteboarding to brainstorm ideas, wireframing to visualize solutions, presenting to stakeholders for feedback, and validating wireframes through user testing.

Step 1: Brainstorming

During brainstorming, we sketched ideas, mapped user flows, and organized concepts to refine user-centered solutions

Step 2: Prototyping

Created prototypes for stakeholder presentation and usability testing

Step 3: Validation

Showing prototypes to users and gathering feedback

THE SOLUTION

To give context the bottom flow is our Swap Flow, employee A wants to swap with Employee B

Easy access to start to the flow with Offer and Swap flows. Simple styling so the buttons don't compete with the main information.

Workers can offer or swap their whole shifts or part of their shifts.

Employees can search for a specific co-worker or swap with anyone in their pool of co-workers.

Easily view and select a co-workers shift.

Confirmation needs to be informative and clear.

Employees want to know exactly where their request is in the process. Very informative and useful.

Employees want to send a personalized message to give the other co-worker context on why they want to swap shifts.

THE SOLUTION IN ACTION

THE RESULTS

Employees appreciated the ease of use and the reduction in time spent managing shifts. Managers valued the automated notifications and reduced administrative load.

90%

Employees successfully traded or swapped shifts without needing managerial intervention.

Managers reported a reduction in time spent handling shift changes.

Positive reviews increased at the Apple and Google app stores.

40%

12%

LET'S GET IN THE WEEDS

If you want to get a detailed review of this project or any other project - please contact me. I would love to show you my in-depth use cases.