Lantum

Lantum is a workforce management platform for healthcare organisations, in particular the NHS in the UK. It helps schedule and manage clinical staff, enables clinicians to find extra (locum) work, and allows them to manage their shifts and time-off.

Background

Lantum’s mission is to save the NHS £1bn a year by solving these two problems. We do this by building a state-of-the-art rostering system that both clinicians and managers use to work together to create a working environment that helps everyone from staff to patients.

The management dashboard is where rota managers spend most of their day. It displays a week-by-week view of all staff and their assigned shifts. Rotas are planned in advance and loaded onto the system, but most of the manager’s job is responding to changes – leave requests, shift swaps, sickness, or unexpected demand.

From talking to department managers, we found three key problems:

1. Slow to respond – When staff called in sick or emergencies hit, managers needed to make quick changes. The UI made this frustratingly slow.
2. Didn’t scale – Large departments with lots of staff found the interface unusable. Many went back to spreadsheets.
3. Unreliable – The UI would crash, eroding trust in the product.

Rob continually obsessed over the details of the product and the experience for our users. His work spanned product as well as overall experience, including go to market projects and branding projects. I highly recommend him.

Melissa Morris

Re-building the Rota

I worked with our customer support team, head of product, and engineering squad to refactor the core UX of the management dashboard, in particular allowing for direct manipulation on the planner itself. We focused on three areas:

1. Fixing broken parts – Customer support highlighted where users struggled most and what bugs were reported. We prioritised these fixes first.
2. Direct manipulation – Adding the ability to drag shifts from one person to another, making quick changes effortless.
3. Bulk operations – Adding tools for re-assignment or posting vacant shifts to agencies, so managers could handle multiple changes at once.

Drag and drop

We watched lots of early customers use both Lantum and their previous methods, typically Excel spreadsheets. It would be easy to scoff at Excel but we took our lead from it.

Even though everybody complained about it, it was comfortable and you could move things around at will. The interface afforded you something that matched the users mental model. In to say, if there are items organised on a plain - the natural thing is to move them around freely across both X and Y axis.

Having such familiarity with their rota and its software was the gold standard for us to replicate.

If managers can drag and drop items, it creates a more friendly way to move things around.

We can also do inline rule-checks such as stopping certain shifts, in this case a FY (Foundation Year) shift being assigned to a different staff role. However, some rules checks – such as checking EU working restrictions need to be done via the backend.

We optimistically update the UI after the drag, but indicate that the UI is saving and can be rolled back if we are disallowed because of rules breakages, or any error for that matter. This way the UI feels fast and slick, but we don’t run the risk of messing things up.

Bulk actions

Often times lots of similar actions need to be taken at once. A row of shifts might need to be re-assigned to someone else or even removed. Additionally, powerful bulk actions like ‘Delete’ or ‘Re-assign’ can shave lots of repetitive work.

Users are presented with a toolbar containing bulk action options. These are specific actions which we’ve found users repeat over and over again in one go.

Actions are held in limbo for a few seconds, giving us the ability to undo it if the user makes a mistake or changes their mind. We optimistically update the UI but hold off updating on the server side until the time has elapsed.