01
Case Study · Ops Tech · B2B

Closing the
Shift Gap.

A UX case study on designing for operational continuity — so that the trail of active work never falls between the cracks of a handover.

My Role UX Researcher & Designer
Platform Mobile + Web Dashboard
Domain B2B · Continuity
Duration 3 Weeks
Team 2 Designers · Data Scientist
Shift Gap Hero
Ops Tech Field Dashboard Shift Continuity B2B SaaS
The Problem

The Gap Nobody Talked About.

A culture of borrowing meaning — shift handover was a vague social contract, not a system. The missing information had multiple real-world consequences and left gaps that no individual officer could close alone.

What We Found
01 No visibility over current or future tasks between shifts — incoming officers started blind.
02 Manual scheduling was manual without workflow — assignments depended on whoever remembered.
03 Tasks were tied only to the active officer — when a shift ended, so did accountability.
04 Supervisors had no reliable way to surface team performance in real time.
Understanding the Platform Users

Two Roles.
One System.

Designing for both meant understanding the distinct needs and pressures of each role before designing a single screen.

Junior Officers
In the Field.
Acting Now.
Case creation, quick updates, and task pickup on the go.
Works in high-distraction, fully-mobile environments.
Needs to know the live status of open cases at a glance.
Must handoff cleanly without being slowed down by process.
Senior Officers
Oversight.
Acting Later.
Needs full visibility across team performance and task load.
Makes decisions from the dashboard — assigns, reassigns, closes.
Flags compliance issues and monitors pending case resolution.
Relies on data to give constructive, evidence-based feedback.
Design Direction

Clarity
of Purpose.

Before touching a single screen, I landed on one north star expression — a statement they all agreed on before we started, and one I returned to every time a design decision became unclear.

North Star

Design a connected system that ensures shift continuity, reduces manual effort, and gives both officers and supervisors real-time visibility into work.

Building the
Platform.

A task-based platform — four components working as a connected ecosystem, ensuring flows from field to supervisor ran without interruption.

Mobile App
Component 01
Mobile App

For officers in the field — fast case creation, task pickup, and clean shift handover, all from a mobile screen optimised for distracted, on-the-go use.

Supervisor Dashboard
Component 02
Supervisor Dashboard

Fully-featured web view for senior officers — live case states, officer performance, pending resolutions, and compliance flags, all in one command surface.

User Management
Component 03
User Management

Role configuration, on-boarding, and assignment mapping — so that every officer enters the system with the right view, the right permissions, and the right context from day one.

Analytics Dashboard
Component 04
Analytics Dashboard

Performance management, team-level data, and compliance health — giving supervisors the evidence they need to make fair, informed decisions at review time.

Key Feature

The Shift Handover.

One flow. Both sides of the transition — the officer going off duty, and the one coming on. Designed so that what one officer knew, the next officer inherited automatically.

Officer Mobile View
Officer · Mobile
Shift Handover Dashboard
Shift Handover Dashboard
Senior Officer · Web

What Supervisors
Actually Needed.

The dashboard was not about more data — it was about the right data, surfaced at exactly the moment a decision needed to be made.

Drivers Record

Officer plans and activity mapped for the current shift — so supervisors always know who's on, where they are, and what they're handling.

Pending Cases

Open matters that need to be assigned before next shift. A dedicated queue so nothing falls through — visible to all senior officers at once.

Compliance Alerts

Automatically surfaces tasks that have missed SLA thresholds, require escalation, or haven't been acknowledged within the expected time window.

Team Needs

Identifies workload imbalances across the team in real time — so supervisors can redistribute before officers burn out or cases stall.

Design Approach

Designed to Scale,
Not Just Ship.

Decision 01
Identify and Resolve

Rather than patching individual handover failures, we mapped the full lifecycle of a case across a shift — so the system could surface breakage points before they became operational gaps. Every design decision started with identifying the failure first.

Decision 02
Connect Capabilities

Mobile and web were not separate products — they were two views of the same data layer. Designing them in parallel meant every action taken on the phone had a traceable consequence on the dashboard. No orphaned records. No duplicate effort.

Decision 03
Enable Customisation

Field operations vary by region, shift structure, and case type. We built role-based configuration into the system from the start — so it could be deployed across different operational contexts without re-engineering the core.

What This Changes.

The platform replaced informal workarounds with traceable, structured workflows — and the changes compounded across every level of the organisation.

Streamlined Follow-up

All open tasks from an ending shift are automatically surfaced to the incoming officer. Follow-up is no longer a memory exercise — it's a structured handoff built into the flow.

Faster Processing

Reduced the average case pickup time by eliminating the verbal briefing. Officers see the context of every open matter instantly, and can begin acting within seconds of coming on duty.

Full Accountability

Every action is time-stamped, role-linked, and case-attributed. Supervisors can see exactly who did what, when — and officers can no longer fall back on "I didn't know" as an answer.

Real-Time Visibility

Supervisors now have a live, accurate picture of their team at any moment in a shift — not a version constructed from memory and morning briefings. Decisions became faster and fairer.

Reflections

What This
Project
Taught Me.

Operational gaps, not technology gaps, are often the root cause of system failures.

The problem was never that officers lacked tools — it was that the handover ritual had no structure. The design intervention wasn't technological; it was organisational. I learned to ask "why does this break?" before asking "what should we build?"

Platform design demands you hold two mental models simultaneously.

Designing for both the mobile-first junior officer and the dashboard-native supervisor meant constantly switching between the constraints of a 390px screen and the information density of a 1440px command view — and keeping both coherent as a single, connected system.

The person designing for scale is often the only one who sees it.

Stakeholders wanted features. Users wanted relief. Only the designer could hold the question of "what happens when this is running across 200 shifts simultaneously?" — and that perspective, held consistently, was what made the product durable rather than just deliverable.

Outcome

Shipped to
Logan City Council,
Australia.

100+
Patrol officers and senior officers onboarded as active users
2
Roles served — field officers on mobile, supervisors on web dashboard
+KPIs
Delivered beyond the brief — analytics, live updates, and AI approvals added over the original pending-ticket scope

Screens shown are NDA-compliant representations generated for presentation purposes.

SHIFT
Case Closed

When shifts end,
cases don't.

"The best handover is the one the next officer never has to ask for."

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