MenaME
Redesign

A case study in making an HR app more user friendly

2021

The Challenge

How might we make an HR app more user friendly?

Used by tens of thousands of people, MenaME’s user experience is deeply frustrating. So much so that most people only use it to request leave - but it has so much more potential than that. Frustrated by my experience of using it, I decided to redesign it.

The Outcome

The redesign is a complete information architecture overhaul prioritising the most important features based on user research insights.

A straight to the point home screen with the most commonly used features - time tracking, leave, and request approvals.

A personal page with employee details and relevant options instantly visible.

A calendar page showing important dates - such as when people are on leave, birthdays and trainings to sign up for.

A much simpler login screen with a pin or fingerprint as opposed to remembering an ‘Employee Code’ and password.

Go to Research process

Major Insights

The UX is so bad that employees are only using it to book leave and record their hours if forced - even then they find those things hard to find.

Many HR managers find the automation helpful but wish employees were motivated to use other features to take more load off of them.

Time tracking, leave requests and request approvals for managers were universally the most important features.

Several users want to see colleague birthdays and when others were on leave to plan their time off accordingly.

Read below to dicover how I uncovered these insights.

Step 1

Interviews with users to better understand their needs

I spoke with 5 employees that use various HR software and 3 HR managers that use MenaME specifically.

Employees want a hassle free experience and a place to view all their HR related info. Even though this is available - they avoid using the app when possible.

Quotes from the interviews.

Step 2

Understanding what features users want in an HR app

I ran a few UX experiments on typical customers of the product - mainly card sorting exercises. First, based on interviews, I asked users to sort features based on importance.

Then, I asked them to organize them into groups - with one group being their “most used" features. The latter was very similar across all participants.

Step 3

Prototyping
and usability tests

Next, I sketched the interaction map based on the above and then designed and tested each iteration of the wireframes.