Vacations Calendar Redesign – Birdview PSA (Easy Projects)
Birdview PSA (formerly Easy Projects) is a project management and professional services automation platform used by teams to plan projects and resources. One key feature is the Vacations Calendar, which lets team members record time off and managers track everyone’s availability. By 2019, this feature’s legacy design was outdated and cumbersome, prompting a full UX redesign. The goal was to improve clarity, save users time, and better integrate individual and team-wide absence data for planning. The redesign introduced a personal “My Vacations” page – a year-based calendar view for each user to manage their own vacations help.birdviewpsa.com – with a new organizational calendar for all team vacations. This case study walks through that redesign.
Responsibilities
I was the Product Designer leading the Vacations Calendar redesign.
I collaborated closely with developers, technical and design leads from concept to implementation. My responsibilities included:
User Research: Conducted interviews (e.g. with an HR manager using the old system) to gather pain points and requirements.
UX Design: Mapped out user workflows and sketches to simplify how employees set vacations and how HR views team calendars.
UI Design: Created high-fidelity mockups and interactive prototypes in Sketch, iterating on the visual design.
To tackle the problem, we first gathered insights from users:
HR Manager Interview: I conducted a detailed interview with an HR manager who regularly used (and struggled with) the legacy vacation tool. She confirmed that the system lacked basic calculations and visibility:
No automatic count of vacation days: She had to manually tally each employee’s taken days off.
No team view: There was no easy way to see all team members’ vacations in one place, so she maintained a separate calendar to cross-check overlaps.
Memory burden: The tool didn’t remind or flag overlapping absences – the HR manager literally kept a mental note of who would be away, which was error-prone.
User Feedback & Support Tickets: We also reviewed feedback from other users. Many echoed similar pain points – difficulty comparing team schedules and clunky workflows to request/approve vacations.
Industry Best Practices: We noted that modern HR systems emphasize centralized leave tracking because manual methods lead to inconsistencies. This reinforced our direction to automate calculations and provide an integrated calendar view.
These insights crystallized the core problems: lack of clarity and integration. Users needed a simpler way to request vacations and a clearer, consolidated view of everyone’s time off.
With a clear problem definition, I set out to design a solution that would simplify workflows and provide greater visibility.
1. Defining Objectives: Based on the research, we established key design goals:
Streamline the workflow for logging vacations – make it quick and intuitive, reducing clicks and manual steps.
Provide individual and team views – users should manage their own time off easily, and managers/HR should be able to see all absences at a glance.
Modernize the UI to improve clarity – use clean layouts, consistent visuals, and informative cues (like color-coding and labels) so information is easily digestible.
2. Ideation & Wireframing: I sketched user flows for both an individual user adding vacation time and an HR manager reviewing the team’s vacations. One idea was a calendar interface for input instead of a form. For example, to request time off, the user could click directly on dates in a calendar and select vacation type, rather than filling out a complex form. This idea resonated with the team, as it mirrors familiar calendar apps. We also planned a yearly overview for personal vacations (so users see their entire year of PTO in one screen) and a timeline view for the team calendar (so overlapping absences are visually obvious).
3. Prototyping & Iteration: I created wireframes and then high-fidelity prototypes in Sketch. We iterated on these designs through feedback loops:
I shared early prototypes with the HR manager we interviewed, to validate that the new workflow indeed solved her pain points. Her feedback led to adding a summary panel (to show totals of each vacation type and remaining days) which she felt would save her from manual counting.
Developers reviewed the designs for technical feasibility. For instance, we fine-tuned how the calendar would handle partial days and multiple consecutive days from a data standpoint. Close collaboration here ensured that features like the half-day toggle and multi-day selection were realistic to build.
Outcome
The Vacations Calendar redesign launched in late 2019 as part of a broader update to the Easy Projects platform. The impact was quickly felt by users:
Clarity and Efficiency: Tasks that used to require manual effort or external tools are now handled within Birdview PSA. The HR manager who once tracked vacations by hand reported that the new system saved her a huge amount of time. She no longer needs spreadsheets to sum up days – the summary panel and automatic counts have it covered. Checking who is away at a given time is as simple as glancing at the team calendar, instead of cross-referencing multiple sources.
Improved Team Planning: The feedback from team leads and project managers was very positive. They particularly loved the organizational calendar. One stakeholder noted that “the new vacations calendar finally allows us to see everyone’s time off in one view, so we can avoid approving overlapping vacations that leave us shorthanded.” In other words, teams began actively using the tool to coordinate PTO and ensure coverage. This represented a cultural shift – vacation planning became more transparent and collaborative.
Modern Look & Feel: Users also appreciated the modernized interface. The consistent, clean UI reduced confusion. Even those who were used to the old system adapted quickly to the new one, since the core concepts (a calendar with clickable dates) were intuitive. We saw an uptick in usage of the feature after the redesign, indicating that users found it more approachable.
Broader Product Impact: Although this was a redesign of an existing feature (not an entirely new product), it contributed significantly to the overall value of Easy Projects. Happy users and improved features feed into the product’s success. In fact, Easy Projects (Birdview PSA) was recognized as one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies for three years in a row around that time. While many factors led to that achievement, the platform improvements – including this calendar overhaul – played a part by boosting user satisfaction and competitiveness.
Ultimately, the project achieved its aims: we delivered a clearer, faster, and more integrated Vacations Calendar. HR personnel can trust the system to handle calculations and reminders, and teams can plan time off with confidence that everyone has visibility. The redesign turned a formerly frustrating feature into a highlight of the platform’s user experience.
