During my summer as a Product Intern, I collaborated with PMs and engineers to spearhead and provide design solutions to several different deliverables for Fountain’s core product.
During my summer as a Product Intern, I collaborated with PMs and engineers to spearhead and provide design solutions to several different deliverables for Fountain’s core product.
Matchwork 2.0
BRIDGING THE FREELANCER-GIG ECONOMY GAP
For their 2018 Idea Jam, Intuit gave teams one week to research, ideate, and design an app or software using Intuit-backed financial services like Quickbooks and TurboTax to resolve the proposed case.
Mobile, UX/UI Strategy
Role
Intuit Idea Jam
Project
Timeframe
March 2018
Matchwork 2.0
BRIDGING THE FREELANCER-GIG ECONOMY GAP
For their 2018 Idea Jam, Intuit gave teams one week to research, ideate, and design an app or software using Intuit-backed financial services like Quickbooks and TurboTax to resolve the proposed case.
Mobile, UX/UI Strategy
Role
Intuit Idea Jam
Project
Timeframe
March 2018
Matchwork 2.0
BRIDGING THE FREELANCER-GIG ECONOMY GAP
Role
Mobile, UX/UI Strategy
Project
Intuit Idea Jam
Timeframe
March 2018
For their 2018 Idea Jam, Intuit gave teams one week to research, ideate, and design an app or software using Intuit-backed financial services like Quickbooks and TurboTax to resolve the proposed case.
Fountain
Opportunities for the global workforce
Role
Product Design Intern
Company
Timeframe
Fountain
Summer 2018
Among other projects, during my last two weeks as a Product Design Intern, I spearheaded the end to end design process from research to final design for Fountain Lite, the hiring app for SMBs and franchises.
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Optimize for speed and scale without forfeiting segmentation and personalization.
Fountain is offering solutions to alleviate the hiring process for hourly workers in on demand enterprise markets. By automating much of the work that comes with the need for urgent worker demands, Fountain mitigates the roadblocks associated with large workforce trends like intensive cost of acquisition and high applicant turnover rates.
Background
Redesigning the experience for SMBs.
For on-demand and enterprise clients, to manage Fountain’s current platform, a proper onboarding process necessitates a product demo and customer success walkthrough. As we progress to capture another tier of the industry in small-to-medium sized businesses (SMB), however, the hiring needs become more calculated and microeconomic, with different constraints and desirables.
We wanted to simplify the way these new users are able to interact with our product so they can self serve without intervention, enabling them to create an opening and manage their workflow all in a matter of minutes.
Market Validation
How do we differentiate between the on-demand enterprise market?
To dispel these uncertainties and redefine the issue at hand I decided to first look at the SMB profile apart from the whole industry and pinpoint its typical hiring behaviors.
Defining a Target Audience
Breaking the small-to-medium sized business segment into even smaller sub segmentations, I filtered through each business type and decided to focus on Main Street Businesses. These businesses make up roughly 15% of the SMB market and range anywhere from franchise to home-based businesses.
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Problem Space
The fragmented gig economy.
At first glance, due to assumptions I had previously made about the way SMBs hired, I had trouble justifying the use cases for building out an entirely new product for SMBs. Was this a problem worth solving for Fountain? Did a need for an automated HR software in the SMB space even exist?
When your hiring goals are defined by a large number of applicants and pressing time commitments, it makes sense to employ a system that filters by efficiency. But, in the case of SMBs, candidates need to fulfill more than the minimum requirements and it’s substantially more difficult to offset churn and employee turnover when they happen.
Key Hiring Archetypes​
To further understand this demographic of users relative to our product, I identified key hiring archetypes in this tier of SMBs and compared them against our current users.
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Fountain’s natural fit lies within the rather niche archetype of volume-based hirers. These are your multi-location grocery stores, your food delivery servicers who “need a bunch of people right now.”
The hiring archetype we want to appease, where most SMBs happen to fall under, are the ad hocs and regular hirers. With priorities and pain points varied across the spectrum, I moved forward to gather more research on this demographic.
User Research
Understanding the ad hoc and regular hirers of Main Street businesses.
I broke my research into four parts: online data collection, interviews, customer success reviews, and workflow comparisons. Interviews and online data collection were my primary and secondary modes of research, done to dive deeper into the needs and preferences of hirers. By soliciting feedback from customer success and comparing hiring workflows from the Fountain monolith, I was also able to see how existing users set up their screening pipelines and evaluate related usability issues.
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Online Data Collection​
I began my research with data on the web for both small businesses (0-99 employees) and medium-sized businesses (100-500 employees), picking up stats on their biggest hiring struggles, decision makers, and desirables.
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What questions should I be asking? How can I outline a perfect job description and present the requirements upfront to bring in better candidates?
In two weeks, 100 people applied. Out of the 50 we invited to interview, only 8 of them showed up. Ultimately, we hired 3.
When I have call outs, it puts a huge strain on operations, but I don’t want to have to staff 3 new people every single day and then be over staffed for the next quarter.
I trust that even a Line Cook at a restaurant would be experienced enough to handle the duties at Proper Kitchen, so as long as they pass the basic requirements.
How many job postings should I make for one hire? Am I gonna get them tomorrow? What’s the estimation on the applicant flow?
If I’m hiring for a minimum wage, entry level job, what are the things I can disregard?
Does no experience mean bad candidate? Some of our best performing hires are students who have no prior experience…
We get people who apply without reading the description and then arrive on-site with no resume or idea of what they are getting into.
This is not like Uber where anyone can slap down an ID and drive. There are harder skills involved, more effort in merit.
I have to manually go in and sort through my inbox for submitted applications which are also mixed in with my work emails.
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Interviews
After researching online, I got a better sense of what target questions to ask alongside general starter questions for my interviewees. I reached out to several franchises and medium-sized businesses like Philz Coffee and CVS Pharmacy through email and phone. For smaller-sized businesses, however, I hit the streets of San Francisco to conduct in-person interviews with store owners and hiring managers of different mom-and-pop shops, developing chains, and family-run restaurants.
Workflow Comparisons
For workflow comparisons, I went through a handful of our existing clients to identify common workflow patterns. What parts of the screening process is essential to all businesses? What parts can be left out? How are users organizing stages and enforcing rules to further optimize their hiring?
Workflow Comparisons
Keeping in mind SMBs would have less use for the more granular components of Fountain’s current platform, I compacted the varying rules and stages into the broader, overarching phases below.
Customer Success Reviews
Lastly, after outlining a default workflow, I sat down with the customer success team to learn what users found frustrating or confusing at each of these stages. After sharing my findings about SMBs apart from on-demand enterprises, we decided what features should be kept and reiterated upon and what could ultimately be removed.
From insights to key design pointers.
Abstracting Painpoints
At the end of the research, I organized user inputs from interviews and online research into aligning themes, making note of the painpoints associated at each hiring stage.
Translating into Needs and Wants
From here, I mapped these ideas against the takeaways from talking to Customer Success and comparing workflows, ideating ways to personalize the experience so we could meet SMB needs without forfeiting time and effort.
Concept
A better onboarding experience.
Drawing together the initial goals of this project with a higher understanding of user goals, I decided to customize the SMB experience around an improved onboarding flow.
For Fountain, the crucial usability goals for a lite-weight SMB version affords access to learnability, discoverability, and efficiency. By tailoring the onboarding experience to this specific vertical of SMBs, we can not only effectively communicate the value of our product, but also allow them to leverage it immediately to achieve their own goals.
Wireframes and Prototypes
Final Design
Establishing trust through direction.
Centering the design around a better onboarding experience allows users to maneuver through the entire setup in roughly 10 minutes. Completing the following key tasks means users have taken all the steps to successfully create an account, publish a job, and finally move on to fully leveraging the platform for their hiring needs.
Check out the live prototype here!
1. Create an Account with Fountain
No product demo or customer success liaison required, new users can start their free trial with Fountain on their own. Quick company specifics help to setup and personalize the experience when jumpstarting their account.
2. Customize your Brand
Throughout onboarding, users are prompted back to the “Get Started” page to complete their tasks. Progress bars and step by steps guide users and help visualize their progress.
Customizing the company brand is easily done through preset design and can be previewed as a Careers page all within the platform.
3. Set up Integrations
Nested in Plug-Ins, users can set up their integrations with the ability to switch between ones specialized for Screening or Sourcing.
With white labeling, we can eliminate the need to set up accounts with each individual integration so they can manage their resources without ever leaving the application.
4a. Create an Opening: Job Posting
Access to reusable components such as frequently used addresses and hiring templates for specific jobs cut down time in creating job descriptions.
Job requirements are divided into preset requirements that are Fountain curated and custom requirements that update in real time. Switching Workflow Filter on and off allows users to quickly make these requirements binding.
4b. Create an Opening: Application Form
Question types and associated answers support the front-end filter and move applicants to appropriate states depending on check passes.
Quick switches for application supplements allow users to choose which supplements are necessary for the job application.
4c. Create an Opening: Edit Workflow
The default hiring pipeline captures how businesses typically set up their hiring funnel. Users can edit the default by moving stages, adding their own, or just using it as is.
Users can also send automated emails that update the applicant depending on the stage they are in. General updates like application confirmation and idle worker reminders can also be sent.
4d. Create an Opening: Manage Team
Send invites to other members on the hiring team to help manage the job posting.
5. Source Candidates
Users can enable Sourcing Extensions to integrate with different job boards.
Published jobs will be posted to integrated job boards and push applicants into the opening’s hiring workflow with analytics on the most active channel and the channel with the highest hire to volume ratio.
Evaluation
What does success look like for us?
Because this project was given to me within the last two weeks of my internship, I was unable to run pilot tests for the first iteration with those who I had interviewed. However, for the future, I mapped out a timeline of our goals for this scope of project and the metrics to address them.
Reflection
This was my first solo project where I was able to deep dive into design and lead everything from start to finish. I found incredible value in triangulating my research and learning to prioritize my work around both business and user goals.
I was initially overwhelmed by everything I had to account for, but with the help of my awesome PM team, I was able to narrow my solutions to address a more concentrated, focused scope of this project.
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Update: All the research conducted + design components created for this project has been used to help establish the framework for the recently launched Fountain Lite! Tweaked to fit the need of franchises, you can learn more about it at Fountain.