Case Study | Francis: from funky idea to strategic dashboard

When you’re ill, you don’t want to be opening up a slow laptop, using 2FA, opening the intranet and logging your illness in an old interface — you only want to stay in bed en get better. That’s where Francis comes in.

The situation

In the clients’ corporate world, lengthy and bulky processes reign supreme. The landscape was complex and no mobile tools existed. SAP, as a common tool was used for all HR registrations, such as illness, holidays, working remotely..

We needed to figure out, as a team, how we could create a solution to handle all these tasks, in an intuitive way.

The solution

Francis is a mobile application, to help internal employees to easily register and manage their illnesses, holidays, parking spots and much more. It combines API services into meaningful journeys, such as releasing your parking spot when you can’t make it into work or setting an out of office when you’re away on holiday.

It’s about reducing complexity and providing human solutions in a simple interface.

Complex processes, simple interfaces

The hurdles

Rolling out a new application towards 15000 user with high expectations isn’t easy. We focused on a couple items in order to have a better product;

1. Guide the people through the enrolment process. Since the app is not mandatory and it needed to be installed on their own (not provided by the company) device, we created walk-in sessions where we helped people to encrypt their phones, and install the apps. This helped to lower the employees biggest fear; having the company ‘control’ and wipe their phones from a distance.
2. Listen to people’s inputs, when they give improvements and suggestions. We created a separate page and communication channel within the app to show the changes.
3. Don’t take shortcuts when reducing complexity. When we created a mobile application, we were tempted to take over ancient and complex processes. We learned, we should not do that.

The future

Francis turned from a funky idea, into a successful and widely used mobile application. Later, the app expanded further and added more use cases.

Afterwards, a desktop application was created that further helped employees during the work day. It’s now being used as a strategic asset within the organisation, as communication, HR and human growth tool.

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I was involved in the whole process, from A-Z. From user research, prototyping, wireframes and high-fidelity designs. Functional analysis, business analysis and talking with developers, every day 👨‍💻