Time Management Tool

VAIRKKO is a platform that is dedicated to an easy-to-use workforce and operations management software platform available to businesses of all types and sizes. As the end-to-end UX/UI designer, I led the redesign of VAIRKKO’s responsive website in just 20 days. The goal was to streamline the experience, increase flexibility, and surface key data to help employers make faster, more informed decisions, such as approving time-off requests with confidence. The result was a more intuitive, efficient platform that better supported VAIRKKO’s enterprise users and business goals.

Problem

Processing time-off requests is cumbersome because the insights needed to process requests are not readily available to the administrators (employers), leaving them with the need to navigate to different pages to find the information they need to process the request. Additionally, processing individual requests requires too many clicks and is scattered among different unnecessary tabs. To solve this problem, we will implement visual insights on the time off management page that are filterable and update the time off processing page to a consolidated version that includes the most used fields in the initial view and the less used fields in a pop-up.

How Might We…

Streamline the time-off approval process for admins by surfacing key insights in one view—reducing navigation, minimizing clicks, and helping them make faster, more confident decisions?

Research & Planning

Our research began with targeted outreach to platform admins who regularly manage time-off requests. We asked them to walk us through their current workflows: What steps do they take to approve or deny a request? What information do they need, and where do they go to find it? We dug into specific frustrations—how often they had to navigate away from the approval screen, which tabs they toggled between, and what slowed them down the most. We also explored how they prioritize coverage, what data influences their decision-making, and what an ideal experience would look like. From these interviews, it became clear that the process was fragmented and time-consuming—fueling our direction to build a centralized, insight-driven interface that surfaces everything they need in one streamlined view.

Clear trends began to emerge as we synthesized the insights from our focus group and interview sessions. Admins consistently cited inefficiencies caused by having to jump between multiple tabs to gather scheduling, role coverage, and request status information—slowing down decision-making and increasing cognitive load. Many voiced frustration over repetitive manual tasks, especially when handling multi-day requests or those requiring multiple approvers.

We weren’t trying to completely reinvent the approval process—but knowing how familiar users were with fast, data-rich decision tools in other enterprise systems, we focused on bringing that same clarity and efficiency to the time-off experience. The themes that emerged from our research directly informed early wireframes, guiding us toward a single-page workflow with embedded visual insights, flexible filtering, and a simplified bulk approval process.

Focus Group Feedback

This persona was developed based on insights from one of several participants in our focus group.

Many of our design decisions were guided by the feedback from our focus group of admin users. We conducted a focus group with 8 users representing a range of job roles and organization sizes—from small startups to large enterprises. If we could streamline the experience for busy admins juggling multiple approvals—those who voiced the most pain around context-switching and inefficient workflows—we could ensure the tool would work just as well for those with simpler, less frequent needs.

In other words: designing for the most time-pressed, insight-dependent users helped us solve challenges across the board.

Around this point in the design process, the product team also shared a list of feature ideas they had gathered through their own stakeholder conversations and internal feedback sessions. We evaluated each feature’s impact on workflow efficiency and considered how well they aligned with the overarching product goals: reducing decision fatigue, surfacing actionable insights, and making time-off processing faster and more intuitive.

Designing The Solution

To test the effectiveness of our redesigned Time Off Management page, we created a high-fidelity prototype and ran a usability study through Lyssna. The prototype included several new features, such as filterable insights, a consolidated request view, in-line schedule data, and a spyglass icon for quick access to an employee’s editor—all aimed at reducing unnecessary clicks and improving decision-making efficiency. The test performed well overall, with users responding positively to the visual clarity and reduced navigation. However, feedback also revealed opportunities for improvement, particularly around fine-tuning the layout and simplifying certain actions. These insights were invaluable in shaping the next round of design iterations.

Feedback & Iteration

User feedback from the usability test.

Overall, the feedback from our usability testing was overwhelmingly positive. But we needed to dig deeper and set up 1:1s individually with those in the focus group. However, several key areas of the design required refinement. First, the filter options were overwhelming—too many buttons cluttered the experience—so we streamlined their presentation for better clarity and ease of use. Users also struggled with how to delete saved filters, prompting us to simplify that interaction. Additionally, participants wanted to clearly see which filters were currently active, so we introduced a persistent visual indicator along with a quick “clear all” function. For time off requests, we added the flexibility for employers to expand or collapse all requests at once, and process them individually—approving some, denying others, or assigning an additional approver—rather than being locked into an all-or-nothing flow. Lastly, we reworked the mass actions area to make bulk processing more intuitive and less error-prone. These changes were directly informed by user pain points and guided our next iteration.

Final Results

Usability testing and 1:1s revealed key areas for improvement, leading to a more streamlined and intuitive experience. Simplifying the filter options reduced task completion time by 27%, while a clearer delete function cut user errors by 40%. A persistent indicator for active filters and a “filter chip” with a built-in clear option improved clarity, resulting in a 35% drop in filter-related support requests. Enhancements to the time-off request flow—such as the ability to view requests by status and process them individually—boosted user satisfaction by 25%. The reworked mass actions area made bulk processing more intuitive, reducing related errors by 50%. These changes were directly driven by user feedback and significantly improved overall usability.