Background
I worked shift jobs at Syracuse for two years. First semester, fall 2021, I was at Sadler. Then from spring 2022 through spring 2023, I worked at Halal Shack in the Schine Student Center.
Schine ran everything on paper. If I wanted to swap a shift, I had to track down a supervisor in person, or email one and wait. More than once I was still waiting to hear back the day the shift started.
I knew there was a better way because I'd seen it. A few buildings over, Residential Aides used an app called Sub It Up. Open the app, see what's open, grab it, done. No one had to say yes first.
Food Services didn't have anything close to that. So I decided to design it myself. Partly to fix something that was actually annoying me, partly because I figured if I built it well enough, I could eventually pitch it to the people who could use it.
Research
I sent a survey out to my coworkers at Halal Shack. Got about 20% back, which isn't a lot. But it matched what people already said out loud in the kitchen, so I trusted it.
Scheduling was the biggest complaint, by far. Just finding an open shift and getting signed up for it.
Right behind that was communication. You'd email a supervisor about a shift and wait. Sometimes a day, sometimes two. Shift's gone by the time they write back.
Swapping or dropping wasn't much better. No app for it, so you had to physically find your supervisor and ask. And if you were dropping a shift, sometimes you needed two weeks notice before it came off your schedule.
I also looked at what already existed. Sub It Up was the one students already knew, so I compared it against a few other scheduling tools to see what was standard and where I could actually do better.
Final Design
Early passes on the core screens, before the layout settled into its final form.
For browsing shifts, I went with a calendar and a list together. Students needed an easy way to flip between days, and stacking the shifts under each date made it simple to scan.
Swap and Drop only show up on shifts you've already booked. Not on the open ones. You can't swap something you don't have yet.
Every swap or drop goes through a confirm screen first. It's a small thing, but one wrong tap shouldn't cost you a shift. So there's a pause before anything actually changes. Each state says something different too, instead of reusing the same generic warning everywhere. Dropping tells you exactly what happens next: the shift goes back to Available Shifts for someone else to grab.
Messaging is contextual, not a standalone chat app. When you swap or drop a shift, the app surfaces a message composer pre-addressed to the relevant coworker or supervisor. You can also open a direct conversation from the Messages tab for anything that doesn't tie to a specific shift.
Design Systems
Usability
I tested the final design with 8 student workers, one task each: swap a shift using the prototype. All 8 got it on the first try. Nobody asked me for help.
Scheduling took under 30 seconds in the app. On paper it was 30 minutes, sometimes worse.
What I learned
The biggest thing I took from this project: you don't need a lot of features to solve a real problem. OrangeWork Hub does three things. Schedule, swap, drop. No time tracking, no payroll, nothing fancy. Those three things were what students were actually stuck on, so that's all I built.
What I'd do differently
If I'd had more time, I would've sat down with Food Services or someone at the university and just asked what they thought of it.
I'd also talk to more people. My research mostly came from coworkers I already knew at Halal Shack. I never got to other stations, other departments, supervisors, managers, the people who'd actually be approving these swaps and drops. And since my research was limited to that small group, my usability testing was too. Same people, same circle. A wider group probably would've caught things I missed, maybe even changed parts of the design.
This is still a design concept. It never got built. I'd like that to change though. I'm thinking about building a working version and putting together a proposal for the university, just to see where that goes.