Task List in iOS Crew App
ROLE & TEAM
Senior Designer with
2 iOS Devs at Schedaero
(in collaboration with another dev team)
SUMMARY
Another team had improved the platform’s tasking functionality. I was responsible for creating the Crew App’s interface for pilots to complete their tasks.
Problem Statement
The other team’s MVP release was being widely adopted. Previously, tasks could only be created for an entire trip, which wasn’t very useful for a pilot. Through Pendo, we saw a huge amount of segment-level tasks suddenly being created and assigned to pilots. But from there, tasks were rarely updated because the pilots had no easy way to do so. We needed to provide a way to view and manage their to-do list directly through the app.
Initial Prompt + Requirements
The other team came to us with a clear ask: pilots needed to be able to see & complete tasks assigned to them per leg. I got to decide what that would look and behave like on our side.
I had the following open questions, which the other team helped answer:
Does our design need to account for classic trip-level tasks, or only the new per-segment ones?
We don’t see a lot of pilot-level trip tasks, so we’re safe to ignore them in our first version.
Should pilots be able to see who else the task is assigned to?
We decided yes as not knowing could lead work to being redone, but because many crew pairs designate one of them as a the app user, it’s less important than other task details.
Should pilots be notified when someone else changes the tasks’ status?
After consideration, yes. It will help to reduce work being redone in those cases with two app-using crew. Regular notification suppression rules should apply, to prevent unecessary noise.
Should we hide completed tasks, or leave them visible?
We considered removing them to make the list look cleaner, but realized that pilots may need to un-complete if a task has issues
How should we sort the tasks to be most useful?
We iterated through several ideas in the design but ultimately landed on a specific format that prioritizes the most overdue, then those in progress before the ones not started, then finally the complete options at the bottom.
Just Enough Design
We had a clear location for the task list to go, and patterns I had already defined during my Design System overhaul. A lot of the basics were covered, design-wise.
However, this was one of the first use-cases for special gestures. We landed on a design where you COULD click into a given task to see the complete breakdown, but we provided enough info on the top that users felt confident completing tasks without nesting deeper.
I tested iconography options for the To Do / In-Progress / Complete statuses and ultimately chose the one that testers found unanimous. (The other options were harder to discern for folks that are far-sighted, a common problem for pilots)
Outcomes & Impact
x tasks on iOS were completed within the first month of release
y% more tasks assigned to pilots were being completed
80% of tasks were being completed with the swiping gestures