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Start typing the task name to find your task
12:30
l Search
Find Task
A01 Substructure|
Excavation work
TypeA-triplex / A01 / Substructure / Excavation
Footing work
TypeA-triplex / A01 / Substructure / Footing work
Column work
TypeA-triplex / A01 / Substructure / Column work
Curing
TypeA-triplex / A01 / Substructure / Curing
PCC work
TypeA-triplex / A01 / Substructure / Walling/ PCC work
Plastering
TypeA-triplex / A01 / Substructure / Walling /Plastering
Search task
10:01
Designing Search Experiences for Complex Data Hierarchy
Empowering users to effortlessly discover tasks by optimising search for intuition, context, and speed.
Aug ’22 - Sep ’22
About Powerplay
Powerplay is an end to end project management and collaboration platform for stakeholders involved during construction.
It helps achieve timely completion of construction projects while avoiding cost overrun.
Broadly, it let users manage construction tasks, material inventory and labours.
Project Overview
Recording the live updates of an construction site is an demanding job, and the disjointed experience of finding a task to update on Powerplay App multiplied the efforts of the site teams.
This became an increasing issue for Powerplay’s paid customers and many churned.
Our goal was to understand the root cause and make the process of task discovery faster and intuitive.
Team
1 PM, 1 Designer, 2 Devs
Impact created
90% adoption
Solution adopted by 90% of paid users
Expanded across multiple modules
Solution was further implemented in other modules like attendance and material management across web and mobile to solve discovery issues in those modules.
Problem Statement
Site team’s have to update task’s progress daily. Finding the ongoing task from a complex list was a challenging task in itself. Hence a more intuitive, mobile friendly and modular approach towards searching task was required.
Why finding a task was so difficult?
Construction tasks are planned in the format of work breakdown structure i.e. task → subtasks → sub-sub tasks... and so on.
The hierarchy of tasks can exceed to multiple levels depending on the size of project
There can be multiple tasks with the same name but might lie in a different superset. (For ref. see illustration on the right)
A plan can have more than 10,000 tasks.
This repetition of child tasks in all parent make the targeted task hard to find in mobile app.
PLAN OF A PROJECT
Radhika Orchid
Tower A
Tower B
Tower C
Living room
Master bedroom
Kids bedroom
Brickwork
Electrical
Flooring
Painting
Flat 101
Flat 102
Flat 120
✨ Same tasks can lie in Tower A and Tower B
SUB TASKS
Spaces inside each building
SUB TASKS
Spaces inside each flat
ROOT TASK
Work inside each space
PARENT TASKS
Stand alone buildings
Child tasks
Current experience of finding a task on Powerplay app
All root tasks are listed on the app.
Site team is supposed to update the progress of the on-going root task that happened on site. To help, currently tasks are sorted by last updated.
Problem starts when there are multiple tasks with same name (same tasks, different parents). It becomes difficult to find which is the right task to update.
User scenarios that takes place in order to update a task
To understand all the scenarios involved in order to update a task, I compared user’s journey of updating a task without any digital apps vs using Powerplay’s app.
Order of priority
As per frequency
Possible scenarios
As a user, i want to
Example
Without Powerplay App
With existing
Powerplay App
P0
Know the tasks assigned to me
e.g. Today’s task - Plaster in Flat 101
Task list by office
Filter by Assign option
P1
Find a particular task to update its progress
e.g. Brickwork (Task) of Flat 101 (Sub-task)
Mark on register
Filter and search do not work
P2
Find a sub-task and update its root tasks
E.g. He wants to update multiple tasks of Flat 101
Mark on register
No solution available
P3
Update a task from multiple sub levels in project.
E.g. he want to update Tiling of multiple flats
Marked for him
No solution available
Challenges
Task duplicacy was a major problem but there were other challenges as well
Low literacy of construction site teams
Planning managers use industry terms for project planning, but site engineer and supervisors are often unfamiliar with them, leading to difficulties in task identification.
Strict search engine
We were using fuzzy search that couldn’t handle mis-arranged words, spelling errors, or unique characters.
Site teams lack tech proficiency
Site teams lack tech proficiency, making it challenging for them to utilize digital applications effectively.
Only one way to find a task
Powerplay's existing solutions limit task finding to one method - finding the root task - despite users having multiple faster ways to find tasks on site registers.
After identifying the problem and challenges, the question was: What defines a good search?
Research
Ideation
Opportunities
Execution
Building Solution
Inspiration
I studied various products with streamlined search experiences, drawing major inspiration from those tackling data hierarchy challenges similar to Powerplay.
Notion
One of them was Notion, it let its users add “n” pages or content inside a parent page. So, how it enable its users to find what they are looking for?
Global Search: Notion search through all pages and content
Hierarchical Navigation: It shows the hierarchical structure of content, showing the parent pages and their relationship to the search results.
Hidden mid-section: Only displays breadcrumb start and end. Hiding the mid-section can misdirect users if hidden parts differ.
Not intuitive: It doesn’t show what it is searching by highlighting the letters or words in result.
Breadcrum showing location of task
Page name
Nesting
Drawing inspiration from e-commerce for intuitive use
Myntra
Myntra has a vast inventory featuring similar product names and categories. It ensures an intuitive product discovery.
Smart Autocomplete: It suggests relevant results as users type their search query. Help users find what they're looking for faster.
Search term highlight: Provides immediate visual feedback
Predictive Suggestions: Personalised product suggestions based on users' past searches, browsing and history.
Smart autocomplete
Search Term highlight
Brainstorming solution
There were two types of solutions possible to solve this problem
Introducing a nesting structure in mobile, similar to Notion.
Re-designing the search experience.
Garden
Type A - Triplex
Type B - Triplex
Type C - Triplex
Type D - Villas
Garden
Pool
GBR
KBR
First Floor Living
Kitchen
MBR
Pooja
Warranty Certificate
1045 - Basavaraj-Villa 10
Task Levels
Update task
12:30
Task List
Floor demolition
Introducing Nesting
Pro
Easy to locate a task if unsure of it’s breakdown by narrowing down the hirarchy.
Easier tech implementation
Con
Time taken in finding a root task is lot.
In case of multiple times task updates in a day, it might become frustrating for a user to scope down nesting every time.
High cognitive load - remembering the next step of breakdown
Does not cater to all user scenarios listed earlier.
Not an easily expandable solution.
12:30
Floor demolition|
Floor demolition
TypeA-triplex / A01 / Substructure / Floor demolition
Floor demolition
TypeA-triplex / Flat A02 / Substructure / Floor demolition
Floor demolition
TypeA-triplex / Flat A03 / Substructure / Floor demolition
Floor demolition
TypeA-triplex / Flat A04 / Substructure / Floor demolition
Search task
Re-designing search experience
Floor demolition
Type A - triplex / Flat A01 / Substructure / Floor demolition
✅
Pro
Time taken in finding a root task is less.
Lesser cognitive load of remembering every step of the breakdown
Cater to all user scenarios listed earlier.
Highly expandable solution
Con
Solution fails if a user has no idea of where the his current task lie in the breakdown.
Comparatively harder tech implementation - numerous logics
Clearly, search was a better solution
Site Plan
Report
Team
Material
More
20%
UPDATE
Floor demolition
Demolition
20%
UPDATE
Floor demolition
Demolition
20%
UPDATE
Floor demolition
Demolition
20%
UPDATE
Floor demolition
Demolition
20%
UPDATE
Floor demolition
Demolition
Site Name
CHATS
M
Filters
Search
Share Plan
ALL
IN PROGRESS
UPCOMING
NOT STARTED
12:30
Search
12:30
Floor demolition|
Floor demolition
TypeA-triplex / A01 / Substructure / Floor demolition
Floor demolition
TypeA-triplex / A02 / Substructure / Floor demolition
Floor demolition
TypeA-triplex / A03 / Substructure / Floor demolition
Floor demolition
TypeA-triplex / A04 / Substructure / Floor demolition
Search task
Floor demolition
TypeA-triplex / A01 / Substructure / Floor demolition
Ideating solution
I designed the search to primarily find the root task
Made it contextual by showing the task name and its relation to the parent tasks
Unlike Notion, I opted to fully display task’s work breakdown structure, increasing the accuracy of task selection and minimising errors stemming from mismatched mid-sections.
______________________________________________
But this didn’t solve all users pain points →
The next challenge was to
Support users with low literacy
Engineers and supervisors on site teams often faced challenge with spelled words like "flor" for "floor" , "Cemt" for "cement" and “work PCC” for “PCC work”.
We Introduced an elastic search engine that handled many such cases like incorrect spellings, and jumbled words.
Drawing from e-commerce, we incorporated search autocomplete, term highlighting, and suggestions based on recent searches.
This made search experience for user more intuitive
______________________ This was our MVP _______________________
It was soon adopted by users and validated task location-based discoverability.
Introducing Versatile Task Search
Site teams generally record site updates on a register, which offer them multiple ways to record.
E.g. A user can update just one task from Flat A01 or multiple tasks in one go.
While on Powerplay, they had to find the root tasks all over again which was redundant and time consuming.
Often, site teams aren't familiar with the precise task names, but they do know the generic terms to find their position in the work breakdown structure.
To bring user’s experience of finding a task on Powerplay closer to his current life, I made the search versatile by letting them search the Work breakdown structure as well.
Designed further improvements
Included other sorting options within search to make it a universal solution for navigation between tasks.
Many portions of the case study were not included to keep it concise,
IMPACT
💯 Adopted and Retained by all paid User
🔎 Search was expanded to multiple modules across web and mobile application
✨ It was further used to solve many discovery problems at Powerplay