Tozour Case Study

Overview

Tozour Energy Systems is a commercial HVAC system repair and maintenance company. Dispatchers manage the flow of maintenance requests and oversee the schedules of technicians. I was brought on as a UX researcher and designer to make recommendations for changes to their scheduling software.

The Problem

Dispatchers at Tozour use DispatchMeNow, a website created in 2001 (by a Drexel student!) Over the years, The website has become outdated. It has also never undergone
UX research. As a result, Dispatcher’s common daily tasks such as rescheduling on-site visits, overseeing payroll, and scheduling calls as they come in are inefficient and difficult.

The Process

1. Research

I started by interviewing a manager who oversees dispatchers in order to understand:

1. What different company functions is the calendar page used for?

2. What other technologies / processes does it interface with?

3. What is his vision for the overarching role of this page in day-to-day functions?

I also conducted contextual interviews with two dispatchers in order to understand:

1. How are calls managed and organized as they come in?

2. How are technician groups divided?

3. How do dispatchers use the calendar page?

4. What are common frustrations / grievances with DispatchMeNow?

Finally, I sent a follow-up survey to all of the dispatchers at the company to round out my findings.

At this stage, I also reviewed competing software packages to understand how they differed from this system.

2. Synthesis

After looking through the interview and survey data, I identified some of the main problems that dispatchers were facing when using DispatchMeNow

Dispatchers couldn't reschedule calls from the calendar page

It took dispatchers a disproportionately long time to reschedule or re-dispatch calls, and they could not do so while viewing technicians' schedules.

Multi-day rescheduling was inconveinent

If a multi-day job was moved, dispatcher had to individually reschedule day by day. Some jobs take several weeks, making this process even more frustrating.

Coding Payroll was difficult and inconveinent

Dispatchers are also in charge of checking and submitting dispatcher hours to payroll. This process took each dispatcher over half a day a week, as they had to go through each technician's schedule and manually count hours.

I also organized the most important features that dispatchers wanted to see into a feature matrix.

3. Design

For this project, I was asked only to make changes to the structure and features of the website, without changing the style.

I wanted to brainstorm as many different ideas as possible at first, so I started by annotating pages with new feature ideas. My intention was to communicate as many different ideas as possible before deciding on what ideas to move further with.

After reviewing my brainstorming ideas with four dispatchers and their manager, I moved on to the next round of design, where I created a clickable prototype in figma.

I tested this prototype with three dispatchers to get different perspectives on how this design worked and make sure it was understandable. Based on their feedback, I went on to create version 2 of the design.

The Final Solution

After testing and revising this prototype, I moved on to a final design solution. I documented and annotated the changes before presenting them to the dispatchers as a team. a few of the changes are documented below.

I achieved 100% satisfaction from the dispatchers, who were excited to see changes be made in the future that could positively impact their work. Development is still pending, but I achieved my goal as a designer to highlight areas of improvement and correct them with my design.