Through a high-paced, iterative process, I directly addressed business owners' needs for more precise planning and scheduling tools with a powerful new reporting feature, resulting in a measurable increase in efficiency and revenue.
Zignyl is a software company on a mission to provide small businesses with the tools they need to be more efficient, effective and growth-optimized.
Without good data, and the insights they provide, franchises run inefficiently. Budgets are overspent and revenue left on the table. Scheduling conflicts arise and employees often no-show. As a former service industry worker myself, it was an issue I was excited to tackle.
Working directly with the CEO—a former franchisee himself—we collaborated on ideas and wireframes at a pace comparable to a new startup. Not only was this helpful for getting to good ideas quickly, but it also ensured the engineers were involved in scope definition and never had to wait around for mockups.
The reporting suite we devised was multi-faceted, covering employee time sheets, labor efficiency, even revenue cross referenced against weather data and holiday schedules. It was, frankly, a lot of numbers for the user to consume, so I focused on telling the story visually with charts and graphs. I was able to take complex tiered data structures and streamline them into an intuitive UI through our process of rapid iteration and real-time feedback from potential users.
By the end of the project, we had created a suite of reporting tools that other software solutions simply had never built before in this space. When the developers had finished their implementation, the CEO deployed the solution to his own companies to test them in the real world and we eagerly awaited feedback and results.
Beyond the numbers, franchisees were thrilled with the usability of the new tools, turning them into evangelists for Zignyl and increasing the product’s growth potential.