Revamping Orders: How We Redesigned Our Project Management Tool

The Challenge:

Sayhello, a creative agency, ran into big problems with its in-house project management tool, Orders. Built in 2021 to make work easier and boost team efficiency, Orders became hard to use and overloaded with features. This frustrated the team, and many stopped using it. Fixing these issues was key to winning back trust and showing why a redesign mattered.

• Account Executives: Found it slow and tedious to create projects and assign tasks, which hurt their productivity.
• Team Members: Struggled to figure out which tasks to tackle first, leading to confusion and missed deadlines.
• Lack of Profitability Insights: The tool didn’t provide useful information about project profits or how each team member contributed.

The Solution:

To tackle these problems, I led the redesign project, collaborating closely with three developers. I defined the overall strategy, gathered user requirements, shaped the product vision, and oversaw the design process. I also led user interviews and stakeholder workshops to ensure our solutions were grounded in real team needs. I organized a three-phase redesign project:

Phase 1: Define scope

Define Scope: Collaborating closely with key stakeholders, we held a series of workshops, one-on-one interviews, and distributed short surveys to gather a range of perspectives.

These methods helped us surface real pain points and opportunities, allowing us to establish the core functionalities for the revamped Orders. By ensuring their needs and feedback directly shaped the redesign process, we built trust and buy-in from the start.

• Client, service, and task databases
• Seamless project creation and task assignment
• Time tracking capabilities

Phase 2: Interface Redesign

We conducted one-on-one interviews, shadowed team members during their daily workflows, and ran short usability tests to better understand their frustrations and needs. This mix of research methods helped team members feel listened to and valued, which was important for building trust in the redesign. Using their feedback and what we learned, we:

• Simplified the interface for easier use, with a clean, straightforward design.
• We focused on making the desktop version work best, so everyone could work more efficiently.
• We made it easier for account executives to create projects, reducing any hassles.

Phase 3: Iterative Improvements

We kept improving the redesign through ongoing feedback and updates.

• Project Creation: Our initial approach focused on minimizing steps. But we soon saw that the system needed more information. So, we grouped related items to speed up the process and make it easier to follow, helping teams visualize and manage a large volume of tasks. .
• Ultimately, we implemented a color-coded system based on due dates, providing a clear and concise visual representation of task priorities.

The Impact:

The new version of Orders has been a big success.

• Account executives now feel more confident and satisfied because their daily work runs more smoothly. Project creation is 80% faster, which motivates everyone to keep improving. Overall team adoption of the new Orders tool grew from 45% before the redesign to 92% within two months of launch.
• Reported user errors and support requests related to Orders declined by 60%, and the average time to resolve issues dropped by half. These improvements have helped boost productivity and user trust across the agency.
• Improved Team Collaboration: The simpler interface and better task management have made it much easier for the team to work together and get more done.
• Now that users can see useful data about project profits and team performance, they feel more confident making decisions.

By putting users first and keeping the design simple, we turned Orders from a source of frustration into a real asset for Sayhello. Throughout the redesign process, we used tools such as Figma for wireframing and prototyping, Miro for online collaboration and workshops, and Jira to manage development tasks and track progress.

On the development side, the team built the tool with React for the front end, Node.js for the back end, and MongoDB as the database. These technologies allowed us to iterate quickly and respond to user feedback effectively.