Mobile time tracking redesign for a project management tool

Scoping what mobile should do when it can't do everything

Industry

Project Management

Function

Mobile app redesign

Role

Product Designer

Year

2020

Overview / Brief

A mobile app that had forgotten what it was for

Forecast is a project management and resource planning platform for professional services teams. By 2020, the mobile app had grown into a trimmed-down version of the web, with the same feature categories, the same navigation logic, the same mental model.

It was visually outdated, felt misaligned with the updated web experience, and was used inconsistently. The brief was to bring mobile in line with web.

The problem underneath the problem

The problem wasn't visual. It was what mobile was trying to be

The web app covers a lot: project tracking, resource allocation, capacity planning, timeline views. Mobile had tried to carry most of that, which made it cluttered and hard to navigate. But when we looked at how people actually used the mobile app, the pattern was clear: almost every session was for one thing. Log time against a task, quickly, from wherever they were.

Mobile wasn't a project management tool. It was a time logging tool that had accumulated project management features it didn't need.

Research revealed something more specific: users weren't thinking about time in individual days. They'd work longer on Monday, shorter on Wednesday, and balance it by Friday. The meaningful unit was the week. The interface had been built around the day.

What we built first

A narrower product, built around the week

The redesign didn't fix mobile by giving it more. It fixed mobile by defining what it was for and cutting everything else down to fit.

Week-first navigation

The default entry point was the week view. Research showed the week, not the day, was how users thought about whether they were on top of their time. Day-level drill-down was available, but secondary. The app led with the unit that matched how users actually worked.

Timesheets Week Overview

Deliberate feature removal

Task deletion was removed entirely to prevent accidental destructive actions in a fast-moving, on-the-go context. Editable metadata that wasn't needed while logging time opened into a dedicated page rather than cluttering the primary view. Mobile scope was defined by what mattered in the mobile context, not by what existed on web.

Quick-access actions

Priority, blocked status, bug flag, and favourite were surfaced as icons at the top of each task card. The most frequent interactions, the ones you'd need in a 30-second check-in, were reachable in one tap without going into task detail.