Project Overview
This is the story of how I helped redesign the placement process to decrease drop-outs, increase ratings, and increase satisfied candidates.
Background
Compunnel Staffing is a global leader in multiple staffing venues including IT Consulting and Staffing, and Customer Business Development for medium to enterprise level business clients.
Problem
Lack of feedback in the onboarding process
Goals
○ Understand cognitive load distribution
○ Incorporate transparency initiative
○ Redesign process with a game-based user interactions
My Role
My primary contribution was towards user research. I collected data through a retrospective observational study and a task analysis to create customer journey maps for key personas. I used the insights to create low fidelity prototypes based on the principles of Hick's Law and Miller's Law.
Team
Andy Gaur
Vik Kumar
Rakesh Shah
Sam Handa
Nikhil Chaturvedi
Tools
Task Analysis, Observational Study, Balsamiq, A/B Testing
Time-line
June 2019- Sep 2019
Results
17% decrease in IT drop-outs, 24% decrease in non-IT drop-outs, 13% decrease in healthcare drop-outs, $2M increase in incremental revenue.
To comply with the NDA. confidential information has been omitted and obfuscated
Here's how it was done
Problem
Observational Study
I helped conduct a retrospective study on previously recorded "drop-out" calls to observe candidates and recruiters in their natural environment. This was the primary research source since there were thousands of cases to explore and it offered natural interactions to look into. The benefits of an observational study are that the results are independent of observer bias and the data is readily available onsite.
There is a limit to how much I could prevent personal bias, but once I combined my sample of analyses with the others, the true values for each parameter were better estimated.
Task Analysis Study
The second research method I used was a Task Analysis study utilizing the previously mentioned calls. I observed external participants listening to a recruiter call and asked them to complete the steps the recruiter stated. Overall there was confusion about how to navigate to Compunnel's onboarding website, Staffline Pro, and there were way too many steps instructed at once by the recruiter.
Online Reviews
Direct consumer feedback reflected the emerging trends from the two studies conducted.
Thematic Grouping
Once I obtained the data from the Observational Study, Task Analysis, and consumer reviews I had to quantify them to perform my analysis. I created some overarching codes for reoccurring events and condensed those into themes. This was useful later when creating personas and journey maps.
Competitive Analysis
Based on the Candidate Retention KPI I created this competitive analysis to show that drop-out's are a key factor in overall market share. This was useful for explaining to corporate why this redesign would be profitable. A challenge we kept running into was explaining why user experience specifically could solve this issue.
Stakeholder Map
Based on the user research and online reviews, this is a rough estimate of the map I made to chart the relationships among the stakeholders in the company.
It gave me context for the multiple perspectives I had to represent in my design revision.
Insights
Personas
Example Customer Journey Map
Peak End Rule applies here which means the entire experience will be remembered as the most intense emotion felt overall in the event- here that is frustration. Often a candidate would be impressed with the speed of the placement in the initial interaction with Compunnel, but that would be overshadowed by the following events.
Low Fidelity Prototype
This is a simplification of the real prototype which has sensitive information. The final product is protected by NDA therefore I will discuss the outcome instead.
Design System
Compunnel already has a design system in place, I worked with the presets and built features ontop of it.
Task Analysis Re-Visited
To test the product I conducted another Task Analysis study with the same instructions but instead I pretended to be the recruiter and simply directed the user to the platform for further instructions. The new observations showed an incremental change in a couple UX metrics.
Results
Metrics
Reflection
The biggest challenge Resisting from creating solutions to my assumptions. One design concept that we prototyped displayed the notification settings in a section when users logged in, but it caused frustration because people had to close it to complete their original task.
Another challenge Articulating the importance of user experience to non-ux teams. This gave me a chance to learn how user experience interacts with other departments.
Key Takeaway Data talks, I just have to listen.