Asset Management - Contextual Research

The existing Asset Management module in Jisr was functionally inadequate — clients could not properly track asset availability or control asset allocation. The system had no clear status model, no audit trail, and no way to manage the full lifecycle of a company asset (from purchase to allocation to archiving).

Method: Contextual interviews with 5 Jisr clients across different company sizes. Sessions explored daily asset workflows, pain points with the current system, workarounds clients had developed, and what they needed the system to do.

Key findings: clients needed a clear asset status system (Available / Allocated / In-Repair / Damaged / Archived), the ability to allocate assets directly from the employee profile, full lifecycle tracking with history logs, and support for rich asset metadata (brand, model, serial number, purchase cost, warranty date, attachments).

The research revealed a core mental model mismatch: the system treated assets as static records, while clients experienced them as dynamic objects with a lifecycle. The redesign centered on a status-driven model with five clear states and context-sensitive actions at each state.

A second major insight: asset management was deeply tied to employee profiles. HR managers expected to see an employee's assets when viewing their profile — not in a separate module. This drove the decision to embed asset assignment directly in the Employee Profile view.

Delivered a complete redesign across two versions (V1.0 and V1.1). The new system introduced: a five-state asset lifecycle (Available, Allocated, In-Repair, Damaged, Archived), context-sensitive actions per state, full metadata fields, history logs, filter and search, bulk import, and in-app announcements.

The Employee Profile was extended with an Assets tab — allowing managers to assign, view, and unassign assets directly from the employee context. A Statistics dashboard was added showing total assets, utilization by type, and total cost of assets.