Project Overview
The Fair Work Ombudsman has released a new app aimed at tackling the persistent problem of underpayment of young and migrant workers. While most employers want to do the right thing, the FWO sees many examples of records that are either missing information or in some cases, deliberately misleading. This creates difficulties in determining whether workers are being paid their correct entitlements. The ‘Record My Hours’ app solves this problem by leveraging smartphone features like Wi-Fi and GPS tracking to make it easy for workers to automatically and accurately record their hours of work and pass-on information about their employment.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Ansible Media Team SYD
Ansible Design Team BNE
Ansible Dev Team BNE
Project Brief
Record keeping is an important issue because in the absence of accurate records, it is difficult for an employee, or the FWO, to address concerns about underpayments. This was evidenced recently, when a 7-Eleven operator was found to have deliberately falsified records to disguise the underpayment of wages.
The FWO deals with over 500,000 enquiries annually about workplace issues, 30,000 of which result in customers requesting the FWO’s formal intervention. This results in in some $30M of recovered entitlements for more than 10,000 employees annually. Accurate information about a worker's hours is essential to ensure vulnerable workers are receiving their minimum entitlements and to effectively regulate workplace laws.
For many years the FWO has been encouraging workers, particularly young people, to keep a record of work hours, for example, by using a diary. The Record My Hours App is designed to dramatically improve the ability for workers to record their hours accurately and consistently. This information is absolutely crucial for ensuring someone receives their correct wages for all hours worked and avoids exploitation.
The target audience for the App is vulnerable employees working in lower paid and lower skilled jobs who, for a variety of reasons, don’t have any record of the hours they worked. A key requirement for the App was to cater to all ages, genders and cultural background, including people in a diverse range of industries and workplaces and those with varying levels of English language skills, literacy, numeracy and technological proficiency.
Project Need
The Record My Hours app (RMH) fulfills a unique requirement set. While there is other work tracking apps in the marketplace, none are designed to help vulnerable workers keep credible and accurate records when their boss hasn’t kept records or hasn’t kept them accurately.
Using geofencing technology, the RMH app will automatically and accurately record when an employee is at work. This becomes one important source of information which can help in addressing any issues between a business and an employee about their pay or the hours they’ve worked.
Employees are encouraged to manually edit their hours and add or delete shifts. Any timesheets exported by the app will differentiate between estimated shifts and those that are manually entered. The app also caters for multiple jobs and workplaces.
Apps that use GPS functionality typically exhaust a modern smartphone battery in just a few hours; that was not acceptable to the purpose of an app that might need to work for 12 hours in an outdoor setting with other usage by the user. RMH uses highly complex and optimised battery-friendly strategies to automatically detect when a user is at work; this required the integration of an array of techniques including weighted location metrics of Wi-Fi access points in conjunction with battery-efficient geofencing to fine-tune GPS polling frequency.
Critically, the app is private and confidential. Users can export data via email if they have a workplace issue and can back-up data to their personal cloud storage.
User Experience
The App integrated a highly complex problem into an intuitive and user-centred application design. The UX strategy was to co-design the application with end users integrating Ansible’s globally award-winning design methodology to ensure a highly optimised user experience outcome.
Initially, the idea was concept tested with the target audience using a rapid prototype to help us understand what users liked and didn’t like, and why. Participants performed a number of tasks on the prototype and shared their thoughts. They also completed introduction and exit interviews, and a Likert Scale survey that provided us with insights on their attitudes and opinions towards the app.
The participants rated the prototype:
4.9 out of 5 for ease of use
4.6 out of 5 for usefulness.
Through concept testing we found that the target audience was able to use the app quickly and without difficulty. The prototype had a native iOS design, and significantly users commented how it operated like it was a native Apple app. Participants were also overwhelmingly complimentary of the concept, as one tester commented, it’s ‘the right time for an app like this’.
User testing was subsequently performed on a near final version app with the target market to ensure it met user expectations and needs. The testing resulted in enhancement to the design and function of the app, including a further simplified and more visually appealing clock interface and the addition of a native calendar where users can roster work and leave shifts.
Project Marketing
The launch of the App provided an opportunity to attract mainstream media coverage and encourage downloads, with FWO CEO Natalie James as the spokesperson to draw further attention to the app and its uses. To promote the app amongst key demographics, the FWO’s media team engaged outlets with strong connections to the app’s target demographics; e.g. SBS to reach multicultural communities and regional radio to reach horticultural workers, like fruit pickers.
The media approach was augmented by an opinion editorial, that in combination, generated significant print and national broadcast media coverage. In the days following the app’s launch, it reached an audience of nearly 1,000,000 listeners through radio, an online audience of 800,000 unique readers and a TV audience of nearly 300,000.
A clear creative theme and marketing collateral was developed to support the media approach. A strong visual concept accompanied the campaign theme, “The app that works with you”, which reinforced the purpose of the app and provided a point of difference with other time-keeping apps.
To maximise the impact of media activity and coverage and ensure key messages reached target audiences, a full social media and digital strategy was implemented, including a combination of Facebook, Google Display Network advertising and Twitter promotion in the most cost efficient way. App install campaigns via the Google display and search networks as well as Facebook SDK app integration were also successfully implemented.
Other promotion has included translated media releases, cross government promotion and direct email marketing.
Project Privacy
It was a fundamental requirement of the project that the user was the only person who controlled their data. This is because a key target demographic for the app, working visa holders, are a cohort who are typically suspicious of Government for cultural reasons and would be unlikely to download and use the app if they believed their data could be accessed by the FWO, other government departments or their employer without their express permission.
To cater for this the App was designed in a way that no data is centrally stored outside the app and no app data is accessible by the FWO or other bodies in any form without the user deciding to extract it and share it from their private cloud storage or via email.
On boarding screens and app store messaging (including translated messaging) has been implementing to reassure app users that their data and app usage is private and confidential and key imagery depicting security is prominent within the app and in marketing collateral. An overlay has also been incorporated to pop up every time a user opens the app’s camera to remind users what they are and are not permitted to photograph in their workplace.
The Australian Privacy Principles also informed the design of the app. It can be used anonymously and no personal information is collected unless a user chooses share it. In addition, any data sent to FWO by app users is handled in accordance with Commonwealth privacy laws.
Government Services
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