Huddle
A mobile app that acts as a centralized platform to bring together talent from a global pool to work together on projects of all sizes. Our team was tasked with designing an intelligent solution that could make the recruitment process intuitive and efficient.
My Role
User Research
Ideation
Product Thinking
UX/UI Design
Usability Testing
Team Members
Timeline
13 Weeks
Tools Used
Figma
Microsoft Teams
Mural
Whimsical
For our capstone project, my team and I worked with HelloXLab in partnership with Sheridan College. The brief our client presented to us was a vision of a global platform to match talent and financial backers to projects of varying scope.
We worked remotely in design sprints to create a prototype of an app that we imagined would run on AI. It would learn the management style of its users and use that knowledge to make the process more efficient and delightful by predicting what the user needs.
Competitive Analysis
Currently, there is nothing on the market that offers the same experience that our clients were looking to create. So we looked at networking and recruitment sites that are adjacent to our proposed app, such as Linkedin and Toptal.
What we found was that all our competitors’ apps were unintuitive and tedious. They required a lengthy process to post jobs with pages and pages of forms that focused on the needs of job seekers, rather than the project managers. They also provided little information to the job poster that would help them to assess a candidates suitability to a role.
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Getting to Know Our Users
We were briefed on four different categories of personas (Thinkers, Planners, Doers, Donors) who might be users of the final product. To prepare for the task of designing the new app, we interviewed 9 candidates who were recruited for the study by our industry partners because of their fit within the four persona categories.
The Research Plan
One of the first things we did as a team was write our research plan, in keeping with the recommendations in IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking Toolkit. There are many benefits to starting with a research plan:
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Writing it helped us to define our goals and identify our desired learning outcomes.
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It kept us organized as one of the requirements was a timeline for the project.
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We used it to identify our desired study participants and create a screener for suitable candidates.
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We were able to formulate our research questions and pair them with suitable evaluation tools.
Research Question
How might a recruitment app deliver match accuracy and demonstrate real value in assessing person-to-project fit?
Hypothesis
Using match-making criteria built around specific professional roles (thinker, planner, doer, donor) will help uncover effective teams and increase the likelihood of project completion.
User Interviews
Prior to our interviews, we wrote a script and sent each of our participants confidentiality agreements to sign.We conducted all our interviews remotely in teams of two. One of us would take notes while the other interviewer could focus on the conversation with our interviewee. While we did have a script, we allowed ourselves to follow the threads of a conversation to build richer data.
All interviews were recorded and transcribed.
Key Insights
from Interviews
Communication
All our interviewees said that communication was an essential element of any successful team.
Timing
From writing the job description to onboarding a new hire, it takes a long time to find the right person for a role.
Soft Skills
When asked to describe their ideal teammate, interviewees often ranked soft skills higher than technical knowledge.
Follow Through
Interviewees described situations where candidates oversell themselves and don't perform as well on the job.
The Personas
We created two personas based on our interview data. Because of the limited timeframe we were given to work on the project, we decided to narrow our scope to one of the four persona categories from our brief. We chose to work on the Planner because they would most probably be the user who would be on the app from end-to-end.
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Mapping the User Journey
After writing our personas, we shifted focus a little bit to imagine the recruitment process for a project manager. To do this, we created two versions of a user flow. In the first version, the user is following the existing journey to hire a new recruit. In the second, the user follows our ideal journey. We eliminated several steps that we thought might happen in the background with the help of AI. It also set the agenda for our next step, ideation and sketching.
Prioritization and Placement
To prioritize, we used the importance/difficulty matrix. Getting all our thoughts down in writing was a good brain dump before sketching. It forced us to let go of our favourite ideas and instead work on the ones we could manage based on their importance and ease.
Then came the question of where to place different elements in our design. To do this we used a product detail four corners diagram. It addressed the question of hierarchy as we were able to choose which information should come first.
Our Sketches
Sketches Round 1 In the first round, we did a group sketch session where everyone presented their ideas for the rest of the group.
Sketches Round 2 ( by Zhouquan Peng) - In the second round, we consolidated our ideas and one of the team members produced a final sketch for presentation to our client. This sketch would also become the basis for our wireframes.
Usability Testing
We conducted two rounds of tests on usertesting.com. In the first round, we presented 3 testers with a medium fidelity version of our app. In the second round, we used a high-fidelity prototype.
Overall, users appreciated the simplicity of our design, the ease with which they could navigate the system, and our presentation of the information on all the screens.
In our final pass before handoff to the clients, we re-designed some of the button choices and added animations to make the design clearer and more pleasant to use.
Recording and Analyzing Feedback
We used a Feedback grid to collect all the results we got from demonstrating our app to different users. Categorizing feedback allowed us to identify the elements that were the highest priority to address before the final handoff.
Visual Design - Style Tile
The Final Prototype
Team members are displayed with keywords and tags in a quickview for easy reference. The user can add a new role with the touch of a button.
The system uses AI to auto-generate a job description and keywords making the recruitment process faster and easier.
A section for recommended profiles uses AI to assess fit for the role based on the job description and then assigns a percentage fit.
A radar chart inside the profile provides analytics on soft skills that recruiters are looking for. The ratings are generated through AI.
Using Design Sprints
We worked in Sprints over the course of the 13 week project. In the first half, we conducted interviews, analyzed our research, drew conclusions that were the basis of our brainstorming, sketched out our ideas and created a working medium fidelity prototype.
In the second half, we went through a testing phase, assessed the feedback we received, created a style guide for our high fidelity prototype, designed a high fidelity prototype, tested it, refined it and handed it off to our industry partners at HelloXLab.
We kept ourselves on track and motivated through the use of Sprint Dashboards where we would summarize each meeting based on what was completed, in progress and yet to be done. We also reflected on our work by examining what we liked, what we wished for and what we wondered about. This built empathy and trust between us and we were able to work together in frictionless collaboration.
