Absence reporting so easy you can do it on the toilet

Our team launched AbilitiAbsence, a mobile-first web application that brought complex employer reporting requirements into a guided employee flow.

The goal: help someone notify work with less effort when they’re unwell, so they can turn their attention back to looking after themselves.

We designed for limited energy and attention: a report simple and quick enough to complete between bouts of nausea. That meant turning conditional questions, date rules and shift information into focused steps, while still gathering what the employer needed to manage the absence.

At Morneau Shepell, I contributed to the reporting experience as part of the UX team, working under another designer. Together, we mapped the branching requirements and shaped the mobile flow.

That goal gave us a practical way to evaluate the flow: how much could we ask someone to read, decide and enter when they had little energy or attention to spare? We needed to make each next action clear and keep the questions relevant to their situation.

We organised the report into focused steps, starting with the reason for absence and moving through dates, times and the relevant follow-up questions. That reduced the amount presented at once, with the trade-off of more navigation. A final review brought the answers together before submission.

The apparent simplicity depended on mapping a lot of conditional behaviour. Different reasons for absence presented different fields. We mapped when a secondary reason was needed, when to ask whether someone had returned to work, and how a new report related to a previous absence.

Dates and times added another layer. The UX maps covered single days, continuous periods and separate dates, as well as employer limits and existing reports. Shift information could be prefilled, editable or locked depending on the employer’s configuration. Working through those paths helped us decide what each employee needed to see, rather than presenting every possible field.

We also had to accommodate a required help widget on the right. Vertical navigation buttons gave employees a way to move through the form alongside scrolling.

The screens below show how the team brought those decisions together: a reason-led sequence, date selection, a separate support choice and a final review.

An employee wakes up feeling unwell and needs to let work know they’ll be away. Reporting an absence is one more thing to deal with when they have little energy to spare. We wanted them to get through it quickly and turn their attention back to looking after themselves.

The employer needed enough information to manage the absence, but the employee shouldn’t have to understand the rules behind every question. Our aim was to help them finish with confidence that work had been informed, with a way to access support if they needed it.

Our team launched a mobile-first web application that brought complex absence-reporting requirements into a guided employee experience. My contribution was part of that shared effort, working under another designer.

The impact we were working towards was simple: help someone report an absence with less effort at a difficult moment, while giving their employer the information needed to manage it. Making that possible meant doing the work of understanding the rules as a team, so employees wouldn’t have to.