Opportunities & challenges in staffing

2022 - 2024

Bluecrew was a startup digital staffing platform with a W-2 model that really appealed to my labor-forward approach to business. We were acquired in October of 2022 by a much larger traditional staffing firm Employbridge with the aim of transforming their business with the efficiencies of SaaS & automation. This story has 2 parts that reflect those 2 separate business scenarios.

Upon joining Bluecrew, I quickly dove into data using Google Analytics & Pendo to identify usability gaps & improvement opportunities. I also started talking to everyone I could at the company to learn about the known gaps in functionality & usability. The Account Management team was a great source of user research in that regard : they work on the platform all day, every day & hear first hand from our clients where their biggest pain points originate. I started setting up client calls to get some primary data about usability & use cases. The job involved UX management & design for the web platform and 2 mobile apps with limited functionality for special use cases (manager visibility & clocking in).

One significant early achievement was the redesign & launch of the Timesheets feature. Initially developed without design input & limited to internal use, we transformed it into a customer-facing version with enhanced functionality & a cohesive UI adhering to our Blueprint Design System standards. The beta launch in late 2023, followed by iterative improvements based on user feedback, culminated in a phased rollout to clients in 2024. Still waiting for data to come in on this one, but early indications are that user adoption has been very high & time spent by Account Managers interacting with Clients on timesheets issues is down 25%.

Another project was overseeing the redesign of the company’s marketing site in conjunction with a creative agency hired to bring a fresh face to the new combined company. I was in weekly reviews and provided guidance on everything from design, typography & language to capabilities and feasibility regarding what was buildable considering my knowledge of the back end and functional limitations. The build phase was very long on this one & I don’t have any solid metrics to measure outcome at this time. Other than to say the new site looks fantastic (typography aside. you win some you lose some).

In 2023, we expanded the UX team to two directors, each with two designers and one researcher. This allowed us to conduct comprehensive user research, including baselining current flows, conducting user interviews, developing personas & user journeys. These insights informed the reimagining of the platform’s information architecture (IA) and user interface (UI).

The site’s money maker flow was “Post a Job”. It involved selecting (or creating) a Position, selecting (or creating) a Schedule and then adding a few details such as wage, supervisor, etc. One peculiarity I noticed was that both the Position & Schedule were captive within that flow. We didn’t expose those 2 data objects in a way that made them easy to manage. Editing of Position & Schedule was limited by the janky back end and nothing applied retroactively.

One behavior we noticed right away was that users were continually re-creating identical Positions & Schedules with each new Job Request. My instinct was that it was because we didn’t surface Positions & Schedules in a way that made them manageable. It was quicker for the user to recreate these 2 constructs than to try to decide which existing ones they might reuse based on the limited information we provided during the Post a Job flow. A few user interviews with some of our larger clients confirmed this suspicion.

A quick fix we applied during one of many Lightning Swarms (a 2-week hack-a-thon-type sprint where dev, prod & design knock out some quick fixes that often get overlooked) was to provide more information about Positions & Schedules during the Post a Job flow that gave users confidence that they had chosen the right one for the Job they were posting. The deeper fix would have to wait for the full redesign which was green lit Q1 2024. After our tweaks, time-on-task for Post a Job was reduced by 17% and duplicate Positions & Schedules began to dminish.

With the opportunity to completely rebuild the tool in 2024 I got my team started well ahead of the completion of the product roadmap & requirements gathering based on known deficits from our research. One designer working on the IA, nav and redesigning key pages to align the whole experience around a common design system, the other working with a PM on redesigning one of the key pages (Roster) that saw heavy usage. Within a couple of months we had a full working prototype of a new limited-scope vision for the new platform. With the uncertainty of a new, not thoroughly road-tested back end framework and no QA function at the company, I was wary of completely redesigning every page and every flow so chose to leave some lesser-used pages largely as they were with just a UI facelift. We would tackle these in depth after launch. When approaching a major redesign it’s often wise to be a bit conservative in a few key ways to make sure the experience has continuity for existing users. The last thing you want is to launch a new platform and have revenue drop off a cliff.

We redesigned the whole platform with a new IA, new navigation built for extensibility, and a new, proper dashboard that provided a Yesterday/Today/Tomorrow concept for daily action items & a Past/Future concept to help the user identify trends & effectively forecast their upcoming needs.

The course of my tenure at Bluecrew/Employbridge

I joined Bluecrew in July 2022, attracted by their unique approach to temporary staffing that provided workers with W-2 benefits, unlike many competitors offering 1099 roles with fewer benefits. Transitioning from fintech to staffing felt natural, as both sectors served a lower-income audience, providing essential tools to manage their lives. At Bluecrew, I served as the UX Director for the business side, focusing on the Client-facing web platform while also temporarily guiding work on the worker mobile app.

A few months into my role, I assumed additional responsibilities when my counterpart on the worker side left. This expanded my oversight to include both worker and workplace platforms, collaborating with a team of 30 engineers, a dozen PMs and a handful of stakeholders from across the org. Despite the demanding workload, this provided an invaluable opportunity to immerse myself in the needs of both user groups.

In October 2022, Apollo Global Management acquired Bluecrew and Employbridge with the intent to merge the digital efficiency of Bluecrew with Employbridge’s $4 billion book of business. This merger initiated a year-long project to redesign the backend infrastructure to handle increased scale and functionality, addressing significant technical debt and enabling new features through a user-centered design approach.

In January 2024, a round of layoffs left the Bluecrew product team relatively untouched as the combined company struggled with disappointing revenue in 2023. The very traditional executive team struggled to make proper use of a product organization with start-up DNA. In July, about 50 of my team mates were let go as Apollo changed course.

I hope the survivors can build out what we had designed. Would have liked to be around to see this one through. We were on to some great ideas.

A quick prototype showcasing the redesigned UI with consistent layout, UI patterns and a more app-like navigation.

We performed a complete content audit to analyze global functionality across pages which lead to our new IA & consistent headers cross the experience.

Part of our proposal was a unified AI assistant that could provide support, create Job Requests with recommendations from our data and help you communicate with your workforce. Internally at Employbridge, they love their “bridge” puns, so I gave it a name I thought would go over well.

Our new Dashboard design provided snapshots of activity with actionable information. Right from the dashboard you could approve the previous days shifts, communicate with your workforce and fill upcoming jobs.

A sizzle reel to sell some projects through the board and the executive team. The screens shown in the video are the old design.