MentorDigital - Time off
The problemEmployees struggle to book annual leave through the current HR system due to a confusing and time-consuming process. This leads to frustration, increased administrative workload, and reduced efficiency across the organisation.
Project team
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Design
Sole designer for design, research, and UAT.
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'Pandas' squad
One of our product squads consisting of three developers.
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Product owner
Owning the ‘Pandas’ products across MentorDigital.
What did we have?
Outdated, but functional
The absence management tool was one of the most heavily used areas of the platform, serving a user base of over 230,000 employees across both free and paid customers. While the wider HR platform had evolved to support a growing range of products and services, the absence management experience had fallen behind.
Built on legacy technology, the product had become increasingly difficult to maintain, with frequent bugs, usability issues, and limited flexibility for introducing new features. As customer expectations grew, the existing solution struggled to support evolving business needs and lacked the functionality available elsewhere in the platform.
This created an opportunity to rethink the absence management experience from the ground up, delivering a more scalable, user-centred solution that could better support both current customers and future product growth.
Risks to consider
One of the biggest challenges of the project was managing the migration from the existing absence management system to the new platform. With a large and active customer base, it was essential that critical data structures, workflows, and key functionality were migrated seamlessly to minimise disruption for users.
This required carefully balancing the introduction of new, scalable features with the need to support existing functionality that customers relied on. Decisions needed to consider not only the future vision of the product but also the practical realities of adoption and migration.
Alongside the product and technical considerations, the project also required clear delivery planning, realistic timelines, and effective communication with customers to ensure confidence throughout the transition.
Quotes from our users
'“Generally works ok, although there are times where my total entitlement or balance does not match accurately. I have to constantly go back and forth with admin support to fix the root cause.”
— Standard employee“Trying to see if other team members are away is painful. I have to put in dates first before anything shows up. Would really be useful if the interface just showed me who off or not. Or at least show me my team members”
— Line manager employee“As a HR admin in retail, we have many working patterns. Everything to do with time off is all over the place, I wish we could have a time off hub just so its easier to navigate.”
— HR admin employeeResearch and discovery
Discovery
During the research and discovery phase, we identified three primary user groups within the platform:
Main admins or owners
Standard users or “Employees”
Users with certain roles e.g line managers, HR admins etc
Analysis of user data showed that the majority of the platform's users were standard employees. However, much of the absence management functionality was designed around users with administrative roles and additional permissions.
This highlighted the need to design for two distinct sets of behaviours and goals.
*Creating different personas for working patterns
Workshops
As part of the research, workshops revealed that standard employees primarily needed a simple and efficient way to view and manage their own time off, while managers and administrators required more advanced tools to oversee, approve, and manage absence across teams and organisations.
Access to absence management functionality was largely controlled through a complex permissions model, allowing organisations to grant users access to specific features and areas of the product based on their role and responsibilities.
*Flow chart for working patterns and holiday policies
Early designs
Road map
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MVP/MLP
Add or delete holiday or sickness time off
View time off records
Half days, full days and multiple days
Standard working pattern and holiday year
Approve and reject time off
Export records
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Mid term
Add other leave types
Record time off in hours
Configure basic working patterns
Configure basic holiday year policy
Record time off for multiple people
Calendar integration
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Long term
Advance holiday year policy
Advance working patterns
Individual custom holiday policy and working patterns
Smart approval workflow and clash detection
Smart dashboard
Later designs
