Checklists
Creating a new feature to expand Raken's safety offering.
Raken is a tool for field-office collaboration in the construction industry. Raken has four established product offerings: Daily Reporting, Production Tracking, Time Cards, and Safety Management.
Beginning in February 2020 I worked with a small team (one researcher, one product manager, and another product designer) to build a new feature that came to be known as Checklists.
Our goal was a customizable form feature that suited the needs of enterprise safety managers and made Raken a serious safety tool.
Where surveys fell short
Like any project, we started with research: qualitative surveys of our users, lab studies in our Carlsbad office, and competitor analysis.
One of the sub-features of Daily Reports is called Surveys. It started as a simple way for workers to answer a set of yes-no questions. Small businesses adopted it quickly, but our mid-market and enterprise clients had more specialized needs.
The existing design had several limitations:
- Only one set of questions per day
- Yes-no responses were not appropriate for all questions
- Yes and No were depicted as positive and negative respectively even though a Yes response could be a negative outcome
Since construction activities vary greatly from day to day, we saw an opportunity to expand functionality and capture more workflows.
Building a template
We conducted dozens of user interviews, spoke with our sales and customer support teams, and consulted our in-house industry experts. The results were clear. We needed to overhaul our existing "survey" experience to allow an admin to create an entire library of checklist templates, each with their own set of questions and response types. Check out the prototype for the Web experience.
Completing a checklist
The completion workflow had to be straightforward. Every question and response needed to follow the same format and would also allow users to attach additional content such as notes, photos, or documents.
How it landed
We started rolling Checklists out in October 2020, and it landed well. Customers used it often, and our research showed it was a clear improvement over the old surveys. It was also the first thing we shipped on Raken’s new web product language, which set the direction for the web tools that came after.