Productive focus group about time management
On Tuesday this week, Moment users were invited to us in Moment, to participate in a focus group about time management. Product owner Karoline Hopland chaired the meeting, and ten committed users participated and contributed their opinions.
Read more about what they found out in the meeting: What works well with the time management, and what could be improved?
High expectations from both the product owner and the participants
At Moment, it has always been a tradition to listen to what you as a customer want from the system. After all, the entire tool was created with the needs of project-based businesses in mind. We often hear from our users that they appreciate this customer focus. However, gathering several users in a focus group is new to us. Both the product owner and the participants were excited ahead of the meeting.
Karoline started the meeting by listening to what everyone's expectations were for the meeting. The participants said that they would like to learn more about Moment, and were ready to contribute new ideas.
Several industries were represented in the focus group, both architects, engineers and creatives, with different areas of responsibility, e.g. finance officers, project managers and administration managers. What they all have in common is that they are experienced and active users of Moment. One of the objectives of the focus group was to map out which functionalities several people see a need for, and can benefit from.
Karoline made a clear call to give honest input - both positive and negative - and with that the focus group started.
Useful input from experienced users
It quickly became clear that the users were generally very satisfied with timekeeping in Moment - and wanted to keep the functionality that exists there today. When asked about the time spent managing timekeeping in Moment, the answer was clear from all of them: "We save a lot of time using Moment".
Since the whole idea of inviting a focus group was to get input for improvements, we could not only focus on the fact that Moment is good. We also wanted to know how it can get even better! Here are some of the ideas that came up:
- A general search field in Moment, to easily navigate to customers and projects
- An option to save predefined text - for comments that are often repeated in the projects
- Better UX design - for a better user experience for new users
- Functionality to keep employee timekeeping more structured
- Reports on overtime used and absences for each employee, with notification to the manager of any excess
- Insight into what Moment prioritizes in the development queue
Some of the proposals are already in development in Moment: A search field and better UX design are being worked on by our developers.
Important feedback that we take with us further
Karoline and the team at Moment have taken note of all the feedback, and are taking it further into the planning of new functionality in Moment.
It was clear that the focus group was a useful forum for both the product owner and the participants, and it was nice to meet face to face to share experiences and ideas. This is definitely something we want to do more of - and there were requests for workshops on the other functions of Moment as well. You got it! We will invite to more focus groups in the near future.
Presented helpful hacks in Moment
There was also time to show some helpful tips in Moment, and surely we got a few aha experiences during the day. The function of entering absences for many days at once was new to several people - and some even said that this function alone would save them a lot of time.
For those of you who did not get to participate in the focus group, we will share this clever hack here as well. If you need to register absence for several days (for example, a three-week vacation), there is a function that let's you do it in no time:
Go to the timekeeping tool, press the green button for "add holiday/absence". When the absence bar is visible, hover over the text (in this case: Vacation) and a plus icon will appear.
Press the icon, and then you can enter the absence for x number of hours per day as far in advance as you want.
We also agree that this function should be made more visible, so more people can enjoy it...
Register hours directly on an activity
Another functionality that not everyone knew about is that you can go to the time list and enter hours directly for each activity.
Now you can enter time directly on an activity in the timesheet.
To bring up the activities, click on the plus icon above the project names:
Find the desired activity and register time as usual: