Min, a web-based project planning software, was the first product by FFunction. Designed with agencies in mind, it aimed to brings together high-level resource visibility with a minimalist user interface to solve many of the problems associated with planning digital projects.
With ten years of experience delivering short-deadline design projects with a small versatile team of designers and developers, our agency had gained strong skills in project management and scheduling resources. We had tried many apps that claimed they would make this process a breeze but they all failed miserably: few allowed you to manage both people and projects, and most didnāt provide a bird eye view of what was going on in your business. Other agencies agreed: we spoke with many creative studio owners and project managers who were disappointed by their management tools.
With our core expertise in UX and information design, we felt we could create a much better, visual-based app than what was offered on the market at the time. Our UX designers crafted a beautiful, simple user interface that delivered automated timeline generation and details on demand. After all, tasks and time tracking are data too, and data visualization is what we did best.
- Got the product design dev-ready
- Built a list of 1000 eager beta testers
Min was my baby
I interviewed potential customers, ran a competitive analysis, wrote the business rules, planned the marketing strategy, led and executed the UX and UI, brand, logo and content design.
Unfortunately, the agency closed before we had an alpha version. The silver lining is how much I learned about building a product MVP. I did a lot of the work with ChloĆ©-Ćve Levasseur, the UX designer who designed the user flows and UX of the app with me.
Building the information architecture
After listing the critical user stories, I created a concept model, a site map, logic flows for the spreadsheet and the user flows. All this documentation was meant to expedite development.
The Conceptual model:
The Site Map
Scroll! There are a lot of user flows to seeā¦
UX design
At the heart of Min is a clean, well-designed project scheduler which auto-calculates the best delivery dates based on task dependencies and team availability. The result is more long-term clarity, less bottlenecks, leaner processes and ultimately a team that has the information it needs to deliverāevery time.
A key tenet of Min is flexibility. If milestones change at any stage during the project, the schedule updates in real-time, automatically forecasting new delivery dates and amending the capacity planner. Based on the teamās tracked hours the project manager can also see how the original plan stacks up against the hard reality of production.
The challenge we had was to create a very simple gantt that would not only show you the planned tasks, but that would also update in realtime based on tracked data. This meant juxtaposing the userās input with Minās calculations.
I designed the logic behind the ganttās visualization. Here is a sample:
duration | The task/task group/review duration (in days). The default value is 1 day and the minimum value is 1 day. |
start_real | By default, the real start date is equal to the start date. The real start date for a task/task group is pushed until the assignee starts tracking time for it. If a prerequisite is late, all dependant tasksās real start date are pushed (but not the start date). If a prerequisite is completed ahead of time, the real start date does not shift to a earlier date, it can only be pushed. |
due_real | Before a task is completed, the due_real is a forecasted date. By default, the real due date is equal to the due date. When the assignee starts tracking time, the real due date is calculated based on the planned hours minus the tracked time, by maximizing the capacity (availability minus load). If the duration was entered, the real due date is equal to the real start date plus the duration. There are many rules for calculating the due_real. |
Logic for calculating start date of a task
Logic for calculating the Real start date of a task
I documented every detail of the plannerās features:
A shadow is shifted to the right (starts and ends later) when:
- the prerequisite for a client review, or milestone has a real_due date later than the client review/milestoneās real start. Its real_start becomes 1 day later than the prerequisiteās real_due date.
- a task has no time entry or no planned hours AND its prerequisite has a real_due date later than the taskās real start AND its duration was entered in the plan. Its real_start becomes 1 day later than the prerequisiteās real_due date.
Interaction design
Filtering and bookmarking interaction details
Creating and editing tasks
