We had a pretty non-functional task assignment calendar that wasn't working for our project managers. We had brought on new team members with different needs: their projects were longer-term and them needed to be able to manage their team with much finer grain detail. I did multiple interviews working with these new team members, and created a list of use cases that this new task manager needed to meet.
We were able to keep a lot of the same elements such as sorting by team member, seeing their projects and tasks on those projects, and see when they were out of office. I went through each use case and adapted the task manager to meet that, working very closely with the project managers to ensure that it fit their needs. What resulted was not only functional, it's color-coding provided project managers an at-a-glance view of their projects and the ability to distribute tasks to make sure each designer was at the 90% capacity while planning projects for weeks in advance. I love how the UI is functional and beautiful.
