Concept 1 - Employer App

Our idea for concept one was an app focused directly on the management side of a business. From the brief, as well as from our initial notes and ideas, we felt that management needed their own app. To begin with, we weren't sure on whether the app should be a mobile app, an iPad app or a desktop. Because of this, we split this up into 2 different concepts.

For this concept, we wanted to make sure that all features of a payroll app would be included. From our research, we found that a rota builder, payroll system to pay employees as well as a way on communicating would be needed. However, the main focus was the payroll.

We began by using research from Paypal and Intuit Quickbooks as they seem to work with payments very well. We found that both of these are very effective and efficient when sending payments to people. For example, with Paypal, from the homepage you can click the 'send payment' button and it takes you through to enter an email or number, and then you can choose friends and family or business, and then enter payment amount. I find this efficient as it transitions through screens, not cramming too much information on each screen to avoid confusion.

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When thinking about the design, we didn't want to clutter the page with tonnes of text, statistics and buttons. To get away from this, a good navigation would be needed as well as an effective home page with only the necessary functions that a manager would need. Things such as:

• Monthly overview of spending/income

• The ability to send payments to staff

• The ability to request money from location companies etc.

• Being able to see recent messages and notices

• Quick access to contact book

To include all of these on the homepage, we would need to try and keep the height to a minimum so each item was easily available.

As you can see in the initial sketches above, by using horizontal scrolls on the home page it allowed us to display content from messages and notices easily, as well as saving vertical space. From the sketches, we liked the idea of a dashboard-like homepage where all information was easily displayed.

The designs above are the first digital versions of our design. There was never any real style with these as it was more about the content that we needed to display. We would focus more on the aesthetics later on.

As you can see, the dashboard home offers quick buttons and links to main pages. We originally liked the use of icons but when seeing them on when we PDF'd the designs, we weren't too sure about them unless they were used with descriptive text underneath, which is what we did. On the send payments section, after looking at existing apps, we liked the list feature with employee names along with their hours worked. This would work for this app as specified in the brief, there would be a maximum of 20 employees in the business, therefore the list won't be too long. We also wanted to include the feature of importing the weekly rota. By doing this, it eliminates the human job of having to import everyone's hours. Doing it this way will make the payroll process much quicker. The green and red coloured indicators on the send payment page are to show whether someones hours have been reached for that week (the colour will show red if it hasn't been met, or green if they have). This is good for the management as they can quickly identify anyone who's not worked all their contracted hours.

Overall, we are happy with this initial concept and feel confident that we can present it to Sage.

#MERCER