Building a tool to keep restaurants safe during COVID-19.
The 7shifts Employee Health Check was adopted by 300+ restaurants within days of launching.
Role: Product Designer (Web)
Timeline: 2 Weeks
Tools: Figma, Lucid Chart, Miro
Team: Henry Collinson - PM, Erica Parenteau - PM, Ingrid Goerl - PD (As well as other internal stakeholders that helped with early problem discovery sessions and providing feedback throughout).
Goal: As a direct response to the pandemic, build a tool that can ensure restaurant workers are not working while potentially sick
Overview
7shifts is an employee scheduling and labor management tool that seeks to simplify processes and improve performance for restaurants, freeing up time for managers to focus on serving their customers. You can learn more about 7shifts and what they offer here
With restaurants starting to re-open in the US and Canada, it came with strict requirements for employees to ensure the staff working are not sick.
Our Goals
Restaurant operators need a systemized way to consistently collect health screening info to ensure the health and safety of their teams and customers
PREVENTION
Help restaurants document and prevent symptomatic employees from working and reduce spread of COVID-19 within restaurants
EASE OF USE
Reduce the manual effort and errors involved in tracking and storing employee health information
PROTECTION
Reduce possible liability to restaurants who become infected
A successful MVP would include a way for employees to be screened, notifying managers of potentially sick employees, and providing a way for managers to track and view this information over a period of time. These were our hard requirements.
Research
We knew that we hard to work fast to turn out a solution so our team focused on doing industry research on what is legally required for the employee screening and customer interviews to understand what the ideal process and implementation might look like across our user groups
What we wanted to learn from our customer calls:
Upon speaking with a lawyer, customers, and conducting competitive research, we were able to get an understanding of what was needed for version 1 and start working on the various pieces.
User Flows & Structure
The Solution & Final Screens
Our version 1 solution utilized familiar 7shifts patterns to ensure the experience of setting up the questions and viewing the responses didn’t feel foreign. The screens below were the ones that I designed while Ingrid Goerl focused on the mobile screens.
MODAL
I wanted to offer some sort of customization off the bat where customers could choose which questions they wanted to include. For example, if you don’t have a thermometer in place, the question for temperature checks wouldn’t be relevant. It was also important to allow the temperature to be a custom field since the requirement varies state by state
REPORT
We kept this one simple by using a CSV export, ensuring it could be filtered by location. This is to minimize the clutter if an admin needed to find a particular employee that failed at one of their restaurants.
MANAGER ALERT
Similar to our other alerts, we leveraged SMS, push, and Email notifications. However, due to the fact that we’re sharing an employee’s personal health data, we couldn’t name the specific employee on the alert itself. The decision made was that the admin or manager would need to view the report on the app to see this information.
Success
Within days of the feature being launched, the Employee Health Check had already been adopted by 300+ restaurants, with an average of 15 employees failing health checks every day.
Feedback post-release
Through keeping in contact with customers after version 1 was shipped, we learned some of the following to help with the next iteration
Customize, customize, customize: Due to different state requirements and preferences of different restaurant owners, the wording and type of questions we included didn’t cover all the cases. We learned that having the ability to add, edit, or delete questions would be a better fit. This was actioned through a customizable health check that was shipped out a couple of months later.
Personal Challenges
This was a great project where I was able to work very quickly with my team on a feature that would directly impact and potentially save people’s lives. That pressure made it very important to not just put together a quick design and ship it out the door but to really sit down and think of the entire experience from the employee feeling embarrassed or worried when they have a failed response, to managers being able to easily keep track and review health check responses over time.