β CLIENT
Akind
β ROLE
UX designer
β DATE
3 months (2018)
Academic Work partnered with an e-signing solution with the aim to improve their employment signing process
Academic Work is a staffing and recruitment company for mainly students and academics also called young professionals.
- Their support into their early career life are our consultant managers. Therefore, relevance is high to relief headaches such as the one they are having when handling employment contracts. Today, they keep track of all the contracts' status and changing contract conditions outside of the system. Not to mention the lack of security it includes.
With a centralised contract management solution including our own tweaks based on a mix of users needs and what we thought was more intuitive resulted in 2 days less on average time on contract approval and 72% less support issues about contracts.
Research
Interviews
I conducted user interviews in order to get an insight of how adding an employment period and signing process looked like and to identify different scenarios.
Main insights
- Gained a deeper understanding of how we could, with the e-signing solution, solve their problems and in the meantime also validate if the e-signing solution was suitable
- Also gained some inspiration from other e-signing solutions they were using today to try and make the signing process easier for them and their candidates.
Ideate
Wireframes
I started with low fidelity wireframes. There was no need to make them more high-fidelity since we where implementing new functionality on to an already existing product. I followed the existing design patterns as much as possible and focused on the information structure and navigation instead because of time limitations.
Main purpose
When I usually do sketches, it is often for some brainstorming at first. I elaborate myself, discuss with my other UX colleagues or for bigger different design ideas I consider doing some quick A/B testing.
After that I present the ideas for my product manager and when we are aligned we present it for our stakeholders.
User goals and challenges
Since I knew the consultant managers wanted to make this part of the process less time-consuming to be able to focus on the areas they felt was more of value and importance, I aimed to try and make the signing flow feel easy and the managing of the contract obvious.
The challenge was that there were two extra pages added in the process, the signing and the preview.
Another challenge was to make a clear overview of the employment period, itβs status and how to manage it.
When we were aligned both on the business perspective and the concept from the gathered user pain points and goals, it was time to test it.
Validate & Follow up
Usability test
Before launching the product, I did usability testing in order to reveal possible usability problems.
The tests were done on five people and they were all situated in Stockholm. The flow was from adding a employment period, signing and then handling the agreement.
Follow up
From a security perspective and professional experience it was quite an improvement. Now, every contract was compiled by the service and was automatically uploaded to the system when signed. Our users had the possibility to see the current status, withdraw or edit in controlled manners and send again to our consultants and customers. Consistency is what we all know, important.
Also, the support team was happy to get rid of more than half of the issues they usually got regarding contracts. Such as when users accidentally deleted the contracts or when important information got lost.
Lastly, average contract approval time went down from 8 days to 5 π
Wrapping up
Lessons learned
Biggest challenge
One of my biggest challenges was to actually keep myself within the limitations while knowing there was a lot of aspects around the process that also needed improvement.
- In some cases it even affected how the solution turned out to be and that was frustrating for my beating UX heart. I think my UX fellas out there feels with me on this one.To trust the process and be sure that the system holds all necessary functions and most importantly in a useful way. Also, the unknown of how much this would change our users way of working.
How did I handle it?
My way of overcoming this challenge was to think of the actual problem area we were trying to solve and try to be as sure as possible to not add more problems. One problem at a time. If you are trying to solve all problems at once the higher the risk of getting lost in the process or not having anything done at all.
- But I will always strive for the bigger picture, it is my responsibility to visualize it at whatever workplace I am at the moment. Listening and gathering feedback and differentiating what is actually the struggle with adapting to change and what is directly affecting the users goals and outcome. We now have the possibility to collect data and compare it to the outcomes and numbers the sellers provide us with.