Supplier & MSP Experience
Client: Beeline
Devices: Desktop
Role: Design Manager
Summary of Duties:
Responsible for the success of the project
Led a small team of designers in full design overhaul
Ran workshops to define scope
Performed and synthesized research into actionable recommendations and solutions
Provided vision and guidance to designers
Designed and prototyped complex flows collaboratively with designers
Challenge
Beeline is one of the top workforce management solutions in the world, enabling organizations to orchestrate their contingent staffing efforts. The company tasked FuegoUX to design two new experiences for their Supplier and Operational Managed Service Provider personas. The new design would need to address major pain points in the current experience as well as critical tasks for the two personas.
Both legacy experiences were highly customized based on the needs of each of their clients. This resulted in overly complex workflows, poor usability and major friction when completing most tasks. Users often duplicated entries (especially in the talent submission process) because there was no easy way to modify or recover from mistakes.
Also, most tasks required many unnecessary clicks and upon completion, users often lacked feedback from the system to feel confident they finished the workflow successfully.
On a product suite level, there was a lack of cohesiveness in the way systems behaved or talked to each other. This disjointed experience created more work for the different personas in the lifecycle of contingent staffing. And while users enjoy Beeline’s customer service and ability to customize their deployed experience based on specific client needs, this poses a major organizational challenge when developing a product roadmap that lacks a baseline experience as a starting point for scaling future functionality at large.
Process
As a Design Manager, I led a small group of designers and worked collaboratively with the Beeline Product team to understand the Supplier and Managed Service Provider personas.
UX Research & Discovery
In addition to a project kickoff session and design thinking workshops, we executed UX design activities and discovery, deploying methodologies like empathy mapping validation, research, user and stakeholder interviews, surveys, journey mapping, service design blueprint, UX audits and demos from the sales team.
These different activities sought to define the problem, gather requirements, scope the project and establish a plan of action to address the various user pain points.
We received user input via workshops, surveys and interviews
While coordinating remote workshops was difficult initially, we adapted design thinking methodologies using tools like FigJam, Figma and Zoom. This required a higher degree of planning and organization to facilitate real-time participation and discussion for stakeholders who are not familiar with the UX process.
As we learned about the roles of the various personas, we validated client-provided empathy maps and created persona snapshots. This exercise gave us clearer profiles of motivations, interests, needs, pain points and tasks.
We also ran workshops with Beeline stakeholders to plot these personas on a contingent staffing service design blueprint to get a holistic view of the staff augmentation process, understand how these users interact with each other, identify areas of friction at various handoff points and surface potential areas of opportunities.
This exercise broke down the process into six major buckets in contingent staffing: planning, search, selection, interviewing, hiring and contract management. It also helped us begin scoping the project and define which MVP features would be designed.
User Research Insights
For Suppliers, we learned they faced major friction in the submission of a candidate to a job requisition. The cumbersome process often entails repetitive, manual entry of candidate details into their own ATS and then again inside Beeline. This persona also voiced frustration with the lack of overall process visibility, inability to track changes and difficulty gathering candidate feedback post-submission.
Suppliers spend the least amount of time necessary in Beeline since their priority (and financial incentive) is to submit as many qualified candidates to available job requisitions. However, they found that the current dashboard lacks focus, is hard to navigate and features like notifications get lost in the visual noise of the experience.
For the operational MSP persona, we uncovered that this complex power user can vary in the types of tasks they carry out on any given date. They live inside the Beeline environment and also encounter friction throughout the experience. They communicated their frustration regarding the high number of clicks any action can take to accomplish simple tasks.
While the operational MSP plays an integral role in sourcing Suppliers as well as qualifying and shortlisting candidates, they dreadfully spend precious time chasing approvals or following up with stakeholders holding up processes and workflows.
They shared similar frustration as the Supplier persona regarding the complexity of the legacy Beeline experience though most have gotten accustomed to their own ways of working and getting around the platform.
Understanding the user pain points of these two personas and how they worked together in the lifecycle of contingent staffing was crucial for us because they surfaced different opportunities to make these experiences easier to navigate and serve the needs of its users.
It also became evident that a baseline experience with the potential for customizability would address the various types of clients and industries.
UX dashboard audit
NNGroup Usability heuristics
Identifying MVP features
In conjunction with the journey map, we ran a series of exercises called “Problem Statements” and “How Might We” to identify areas of focus that would create higher impact and set the foundation for a new, robust and modern Beeline experience.
Overlapping pain points between the Managed Service Providers and Suppliers gave us themes where we could focus design efforts and benefit both personas.
We worked with the Beeline Product team to further distill and prioritize the various types of tasks both users needed to accomplish in order to be successful. These critical tasks would be the basis for the design of the new experience.
Later, we outlined this design vision for both personas in a narrative called the “Golden Thread” which encapsulates the ideal, to-be scenario for how the new experience addresses major points, weaves it into the typical day of the user, and integrates forward-thinking design solutions into the new Beeline system.
Design
Before jumping into design, we ran three workshops with the Beeline Product team to define the look and feel of the new experiences through mood boards and prompts that encouraged discussion for how the team envisioned the new platforms.
Then, leveraging the Beeline Design System, we began the design of the Supplier experience in low-fidelity wireframes. The initial focus was the dashboard where the Supplier interviewees expressed their desire for an experience that would give them the information they needed when they needed it. The key principle in the design of the new Beeline experience was to ensure it was timely, relevant and actionable no matter where the user was in the system.
Supplier Experience Wireframe Versions 1 and 5
Working closely with the Beeline Product Team, we collaborated on features like notifications/alerts, search, approvals, job requests and candidate status among a few other critical features. Gaining insight from Beeline SMEs as well as designers and product owners, the design of the Supplier experience went through many exploratory sessions and iterations with the goal of simplifying tasks and designing an experience that gets out of the way of the user.
Supplier Experience High Fidelity Mockup
We focused on the Supplier experience first and then followed a similar process with the MSP persona. Given we had more of a design language established, we jumped right into tackling the critical tasks for this persona. The needs of the MSP were different and the experience followed suit while maintaining the same focus on simplicity and clean design. We addressed their need for a clear approvals process, a new modern dashboard, basic calendar functionality, collaboration with Hiring Managers and qualifying/shortlisting.
Managed Service Provider Experience High Fidelity Mockup
Deliverables
The end result was a comprehensive high-fidelity MVP prototype for the Supplier and MSP personas. These foundational experiences will be validated with users and seek feedback regarding the proposed design solution, how these address their needs and how usable the new systems are. This critical feedback will ensure the next iterations continue to address the user’s pain points and drive the refinement of both experiences.
Beeline Managed Service Provider Experience Demo
Beeline Supplier Experience Demo
Conclusion
With these new Supplier and Operational MSP Experiences, we are helping Beeline bring competitive, fresh and modern applications to the market. These new solutions will empower users to better serve their clients from small operations to large-scale organizations. In conjunction with HMX and the Talent Experience, this suite of products will provide end-to-end, user-centered solutions that set Beeline apart in the workforce management industry.