NEO HR & Finance System

Product Description
NEO HR and Finance System is an online system designed to assist with HR and Finance administrative functions. This evaluation will focus specifically on the section of the system used to submit time sheets.

Target population
It is used by both HR administrators and payroll at UTS as part of their management duties, as well as by casual staff who need to submit their time sheets.

Heuristics

Match Between System and Real World
A major concern involving NEO's time sheet submission section is that there seems to be a mismatch between language used by the user and language that is in the system. In order to lodge a time sheet, one of the areas that need to be filled out is "position". It requires the user to search for and select a pre-determined position, as seen in the image below.

The system relies heavily on images to get the message across, so users would have to know that a magnifying glass means "Search". Users can simply type a position title into the text box, but once the user attempts to navigate to the next box, a search window will pop up and prompt the user to choose a pre-set job title.

Choosing from a pre-set job title makes sense within the system, but when the system comes up with no results, this can get problematic.

It also inexplicably makes the user sign in twice: once on the home page, and again once the user clicks on the "NEO" bookmark. There is no explanation as to why the sign-in must occur twice, but it is a waste of time - especially since the sign-ins occur one after the other, and there is no way to skip them.

User Control and Freedom
NEO does not offer much in the way of user control and freedom, particularly the payroll section. This is understandable, because it is a type of management system and the rigidity ensures that employees all get paid fairly. The issue of language is not a particularly pressing one, and can be easily accustomed to after using the system a few times.

Help Users Recognise, Diagnose and Recover
As mentioned above, there is an issue submitting time sheets, and the system does not provide any help points on the page at all. As discussed below, the documentation that is available does not provide much help in either recognising, diagnosing or recovering from the problem.
Help and Documentation
There is a FAQ section within the system, which can be located on the front login page of the NEO website.

As the screenshot shows, there are several options that offer help and support to confused users. "Logging into NEO for the first time", "User Guide", "Online Help", "NEO Support" and "FAQ" are the options that are presented to the user. While "logging into NEO for the first time" is a straightforward heading and will only be used by people who have never used the system before. However, the other options are more ambiguous in their audience targeting, and at first glance all seem like similar pages with different wording. 

"Online Help" and "NEO Support" both have blurbs underneath the heading to clarify their purpose, but "User Guide" and "Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)" do not. It could be argued that those two headings are self-explanatory, but it does create an element of inconsistency on the page that may confuse users who are looking for a specific type of help. 

Additionally, unlike the rest of the links on the page, "User Guide" does not link to another webpage, but rather a direct download for a PowerPoint file. This poses a couple of issues: firstly, it does not indicate that clicking on the link prompt the user to download a file. Secondly, it assumes that all users are able to download and access the User Guide file, which may not be the case. This accessibility issue renders one portion of the help documentation useless to people who are unable to download and read PowerPoint files on their device.

The help documents on time sheet submission are all PDF files, which again poses another access barrier. In addition to this, the help files are at least four years old, and the system has changed since then, rendering the help documents useless.

Conclusion
The help section of the NEO system is particularly bad, which is a huge problem, because the system is not intuitive at all and offers little to no instruction. While the payroll section of the system is fairly self-explanatory, it does not seem to work and does not provide an explanation on what is going wrong and how to fix it.

Overall, NEO is a very frustrating system to use.