Improving UI/UX to help a recruitment platform scale globally
Role: Product Design Lead
10+
Multidisciplinary team
9
Months
6
Customised UI themes
6
Responsive UI flows
5+
Pages web design
2
Design team
The Context
When the business started to scale, poor UX and technology bottlenecks became problematic for growth.
The client was a recruitment platform that allows companies to find freelance talent on demand and allows freelance talent to find their next contract or freelance gig. Their mission is to accelerate the future of work.
They constructed their initial MVP to prove market fit and begin gaining traction, both of which it had successfully delivered. The problem was that when the business started to scale, poor UX and technology bottlenecks became problematic for growth. Struggling to scale with original tech, they wanted to take its platform to a new level and encourage better user experience and engagement.
I participated in the project as the product design lead, working alongside the client’s team and an account manager, a tech lead, and a development and design team on the ClearSky side.
Goals and Tasks
To rebuild the UI and design system and to identify and deliver a better user experience for the platform within the constraints of the project.
Our goal as a team was to re-platform the product, allowing the company to scale globally.
My role was to rebuild the UI and design system and to identify and deliver a better user experience for the platform within the constraints of the project.
I wanted to help the client to understand the value of design and give them tools and an understanding of design processes to keep evolving their product.
Actions
1 - An actionable list of improvements.
The first thing was to decide what to work on and in what order. The client’s team gave my team access to user feedback. Based on this feedback, I proposed a prioritisation exercise to create an actionable list of improvements. I worked with the product owner, lead developer and account manager to analyse and prioritise this list using an impact-effort matrix.
To help the business get more talent to join the platform, I researched the freelancer's motivations and created ideas for improvements based on Nir Eyal's “Hooked” model. This exercise was outside the scope of the redevelopment. Still, it led to more buy-in of user experience design and contributed to the client to keep working with us.
2 - A contemporary look and feel.
I worked with the client’s marketing team to refresh the UI style according to their vision of the product as a mainstream platform. I created a contemporary look and feel, aligning with the market and bringing images of people to the forefront. I also refreshed the style of the marketing website and led the design team to develop it.
3 - Improve the usability of the components and create a system that is easy to customise.
For the design system, the two main changes were to improve the usability of the components and create a system that was easy to customise.
For usability, I introduced principles of UX in the navigation and individual components.
I worked on a palette with shades generated from two primary colours for the customisable system. The system also guarantees that the colour contrasts will remain compliant. In this way, a designer can create a customised theme in minutes. It was easy for developers to implement as well.
Results
The design team made a more significant contribution to the company and the client's products than ever before, opening the doors for the design team to grow.
Only a few months after the rework, the platform enjoys an "Excellent" Trustpilot rating of 4.3 and a G2 rating of 4.9 (five stars).
The product was re-platformed in less than nine months, and the interface was redesigned and developed. The platform can now be white-labelled, opening up new revenue-generating ideas for the business.
The key to the project's success was a collaboration between different disciplines within the team and the client and an agile delivery process.
As my first project as a design lead for this company, it was a successful outcome not only because we delivered the platform but also because the design team made a more significant contribution to the company and the client's products than ever before, opening the doors for the design team to grow.
Projects
About me
Contact
lautecce@gmail.com