While I consider myself a ‘full stack’ developer, taking care of everything from the back end to the front end of town, one area that I tend to lack is in my design skills. I am trying to learn more about good graphic and user experience (UX) design principles, so that I can improve the software I write without having to resort to a third party expert every time.
What better way to start than with my flagship SaaS HR product, which is in use by over a thousand people all over the world? Looking at the stats on Google Analytics, I see that the most common screen used on my app is the employee Leave Request screen, which employees of our customers use to ask for time off from their managers.
While we haven’t really heard any real complaints about this screen, I knew we could make it easier for people to use, without too much effort. Here is the original screen:
I thought the blue bordering on this screen made it look a little dated. Plus the title at the top which says “Request Leave or Time Off” seems a little disconnected from the rest of the screen. Lastly, the one bit of feedback we’ve heard from employees was that they would like to see the company leave calendar on here which was useful to them when planning time off.
So, I sat down for a morning, and reworked the screen to remove the borders, and make it look more like a plain paper leave application form:
I removed the top title as it was redundant, and removed the borders around the window. I also squashed the main form down a little to increase white space around it and make it look more like a paper form that the employees would have been used to filling out before.
I also removed a lot of extra words within the form (i.e. the help text below each field) and made them popups that would appear when the user clicked on the ‘?’ icon above each field. Just to make things cleaner and have less word clutter.
At the bottom of the screen, you can see where I have ‘squished’ the old list of leave balances down, which is still readable, and added the company leave calendar to the system.
After some initial testing, I made some finer touches for the final version:
Not much that is immediately obvious, but they did make the form seem aesthetically better. I fixed the alignment of text across the form, plus I added a background colour to the form fields themselves so they stood out a little and didn’t make the form look so washed out and overly white.
What do you think? We actually saw an uptick of activity on this form already this week since we put out the update to production, and so far no one has emailed in to complain about anything, which is a good sign IMO.
Because I am all about constant learning and improving, I would love to hear from some experienced designers out there as to how I could make things better.