Sam's Club

Improving employee task management

Sam’s Club needed to supplant and improve their current task management system as part of a continued expansion of their associate application, MyClub. We integrated with the MyClub experience team to expand and prototype core workflows for task tracking and note taking. We continued to support the Sam’s Club team through development of an MVP that will serve as a foundation for continued expansions of MyClub.

Ux & Visual Design | 14 weeks | 2020

Supporting managers and associates

Sam’s recently updated the team structure in the clubs to allow for more fluidity and shared responsibility within each department. In order to support this structure, the new task system needed to facilitate information sharing and communication between managers, associates, and their team members.

Coordinating tasks across the club

The core views of the application provide managers and associates with high-level summaries that allow them to understand and assess the progress of tasks across departments and groups within the club. Providing visibility into tasks and progress within each team allows team members to support each other while offering insights into current and upcoming workloads.

Extending the MyClub visual language

The new task workflows required components not currently present in the foundational MyClub design language. Leveraging the MyClub typography, color palette, and iconography, visuals in MyClub Tasks were designed to clearly highlight the critical scheduling, assignment details, and current status of each task.
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New elements created for tasks were a natural extension of the visual language and established new components and patterns that can be used as MyClub continues to grow.

Capturing and organizing notes

Note taking is crucial for managers in capturing information within the club. However, individual approaches to note taking made cross-club sharing difficult and tracking impossible.
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Working with the Sam’s team, we created an approach to note taking that standardized the format, promoted organization related to team structure, while still allowing for freedom of content within shared and personal notes.

Translating notes to tasks

Needs and to-dos are often captured by managers through notes. A major improvement goal for the new task system was to allow managers to quickly convert notes to tasks.
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We helped the MyClub team prototype a workflow that would allow managers to quickly convert notes to tasks, streamlining the task creation and assigning process.

A holistic approach to task management

Bringing together tasks and notes in the MyClub system gives managers and associates a holistic view of task creation and management. The new task system closes the gap in coordination and follow-through that previously hindered progress within the clubs.

Uniting these capabilities with the performance tracking already available in MyClub provides a foundation for Sam’s Club to continue to streamline workflows and support associates in their day-to-day assignments.

A foundation for continued expansion

Development of an MVP

The design team worked closely with Sam’s internal development team for the entirety of the program. Remaining in sync with development was critical in understanding backend capabilities and assessing technical feasibility to allow us to deliver designs that were achievable within the development timeline. The team supported Sam’s through the development of the MVP for tasks and notes.

Consultancy through partnership

During the course of the engagement we worked directly with Sam’s Club designers and developers – allowing us to act as partners in addition to consultants. This level of integration allowed us to garner a deep understanding of the needs and challenges when creating tools for use in clubs. Through this understanding we were better able to support the MyClub experience team in achieving their goals for a new task management system.