lantum

The challenge

When secondary care workers try to swap shifts, they would have to look at the full rota and compare their schedule to everyone else’s to identify someone suitable for a shift swap. Workers can only swap shifts that are equal in terms of skill requirement and shift length.

Sometimes workers would try to organise an unofficial chat group as a swap shop where people can post and pick up shifts for swaps, however in reality, those groups are almost always misused and when someone is actually looking for a shift to swap, they would have to scroll through a series of unrelated messages to find a potential shift, resulting in a horrible user experience.

Lantum’s solution is to simply streamline that workflow, as our research insight suggests workers will always try to swap out of a shift due to an unexpected life arrangement. By having the user choose the shift they are trying to swap out of, Lantum can pair them with people who are available to take their shift, and also have shifts for the user to swap into.

Once a workers have agreed to a swap, it would then need manager approval. Managers are some of the busiest people in a secondary care setting. They would have to consider skill-mix, experience of the affected shifts in a swap as well as the workers’ schedule after swap. By surfacing those criteria helps managers make more informed decisions, and reducing their time spent on admin work.

Flow diagram

Initial sketches

The challenge

Unexpected changes happen to people’s schedule all the time because life happens. As a result, managers and senior staff need to action these changes regularly, whilst having to adhere all the rules and regulations. Senior staff can sometimes forget about certain rules and result in someone working an unsafe shift pattern or overtime. Alternatively, rules are sometimes broken deliberately to gain coverage in an area with staff shortage.

By way of processing every action through the rules engine, managers and senior staff members are immediately made aware of any rule conflicts, therefor are able to make more informed decisions.

The challenge

In nearly all secondary care settings, the worker suggestion phase of schedule building is either done completely on paper or using a piece of archaic software that doesn’t work half of the time. Workers typically send in their suggestions independently without any information of colleagues’ suggestions. They are also expected to know all of the organisation policies when self scheduling, which is often not the case. These conditions then would almost always result in some workers not getting certain shifts, which might be anchor dates that worker would make their life plans around.

Lantum’s approach was to apply the rules engine to this workflow. Workers are made aware of all the possible potential shifts and restrictions as they input their days, resulting in a linear self scheduling experience.

Flow diagram

Initial sketches

The Challenge

Due to the nature of a fast-paced start up being around for a decade without documentation on a standardised design system, the Lantum library had inherited legacy patterns that are out of date, mismatched, or completely broken. This resulted in a fragmented design system. Though it could be maintained albeit laboriously, while everyone worked in the same office, it quickly became evident that a change was needed to adapt to the nature of remote working.

The design team was using Sketch for design - which often times we find each other using components that are out of sync, Marvel for prototyping - which was time consuming, and Zeplin for handovers. After several discussions amongst each other and with more experienced front-end developers, we decided to migrate everything to Figma, which can do all. During the migration, I took on the task of combing through our design system and making sense of everything, from atoms to organisms.

The Icon System

Lantum has gone through several iterations in design direction when I joined. The icon library consists of icons from every iteration of the product, without a consistent design language. Furthermore, the handover process of icons have always been problematic between designers and developers, resulting in inconsistent visuals between designers’ work and live product.

The Colour System

The Lantum colour system was non-existent. The design library inherited a colour palette when the brand was created years ago. Though there had been some thought given to how the colours are to be used in the context of the brand, there was no guidance on how to use the colours within the product. This resulted in a product with colour usages that fail WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards on several core features.

The solution was rather simple, to create a colour guide that ensures that all uses comply with WCAG 2.1 standards. From the guide we’d then perform an audit to the product and make adjustments accordingly. This would also provide guidance on any new design components.

After the audit and adjustments to colour uses in product, we were able to achieve WCAG 2.1 AA standards across all features.

Lantum Design System

I was obsessed with optimising our internal processes. An area where I saw an opportunity to improve was how we used our design systems; designers would work on projects independently using design principles which are verbally agreed upon in advance. However over time the interpretation of these principles change due to the different new features, which may require new thinking. This resulted in slight variations in how a single design pattern is used, sometimes within the same feature worked on by multiple designers. This is all because we didn’t have a single source of truth when it comes to our design patterns.

To resolve this issue, I conducted an audit of our entire design library as well as how they are applied in product and documented their design principles and how they should behave on Confluence. Then built out a fully dynamic design library in Figma as we thought that was best tool for multiple designers to collaborate while working remotely. This helped us achieve consistency in every detail across the product and has been adopted by the design team as standard process.