Optimising the usability of an internal time reporting system 14 Nov 2007

Jesper Rønn-Jensen describes some of the work he's been doing to optimise the usability of an internal time reporting system for Capgemini. We really liked his "lessons learned" section, especially his data-driven approach to justifying his design decisions:

"Using statistics to underpin our conclusions was very effective. We had stats from 98,000 timereports submitted by 3,500 people in 5 companies in 4 countries. We used these statistics to base some of the conclusions on: Which fields could be hidden by default? How many projects did people usually choose from, etc...The statistics were very effective, focusing the different organizations to work in the same direction: Previous there had been discussion over the theme: 'But our organisation /team /project is special'. They stopped because the numbers could prove that some organisations thought all employees did a certain thing always. The numbers could prove that only for instance 30% of the employees had the issue. So we could argue that changing would only benefit 30% and hurt 70%."