Staffico
Redesign of a product (applicant tracking system for recruitment teams and companies)
Summary
Staffico is ATS SaaS tool for recruiting and staffing agencies or for recruitment teams.
Project
Complete redesign of the product
Company
Bulpros Consulting
Services
- Information Architecture
- UX design
- Wireframing
- Prototyping
Challenges
Understand WHY
The main challenge was that all features - pages and the connections between were already developed. And we had to balance the best decisions and the need to rewrite a huge amount of code. And untangling what to keep and what to throw out is a challenge.
Another big challenge was the negative first impression of the users and disappointment. They refused to use the product and this made it challenging to use methods such as heat maps or usability testing. In regard to user research, we had to start from the beginning.
Another big challenge was that а considerable part of the stakeholders and developers team have had involvement in the current version creation and it was difficult for them to understand why this redesign was imposed so soon after the release of the product.
Current user experience - pain points
Users did not well accept the first version of Staffico. There were two main reasons: the project was running with no user experience designer included and the decisions weren't based on user research. Users did not well accept the product. The new project in front of our team was to redesign the product in general, starting from the user journeys and data flows to page views.
The Outcome
Improved user satisfaction - more intuitive interfaces, streamlining processes, and addressing pain points identified through user research.
We have increased user engagement by improving overall usability and accessibility.
Higher conversion rates: By carefully designing the user flow and removing obstacles (for instance easy Candidate profile creation, or a way of tracking and moving candidates through the project pipeline), we increase the overall product use.
Reduced user errors and support requests by providing clear and helpful feedback, users can accomplish tasks without confusion or frustration.
Improved efficiency and productivity - by streamlining workflows, and automating some tasks, such as automatically assigning new statuses to candidates, or sending notification emails, we help users accomplish their goals more quickly and effectively.
Exiting design - create client page
User research
We had to gather information on how the site is currently performing. To get more general information from our users, we created a survey. Our product had already about 30-40 registered users and we asked them a few general questions to understand what they identify as major issues. We also asked them to make suggestions for product improvements. They were young people, mostly ladies, so we decided to motivate them, using simple gamification. We gave them the opportunity to vote anonymously for each decision we had collected. There were awards for the three most voted decisions.
Redesign guidelines
After the user interviews, we have concluded several major redesign guidelines:
- increase color contrast
- simplify the workflow
- add/improve a large part of content's messages
We asked our users which alternative tools they use in everyday work. Almost all of them had said LinkedIn or Excel. That's why we've kept the table preview of the lists, but we've experimented with an extra panel that we proposed in two versions - to slide over the grid content or to push left by collapsing page content. Both options had their pros and cons, but the user's feedback was in favor of overlay panels. They did not like the option of moving the page content and preferred not to have the important part of the information in the list to be hidden.
The overlay panel option is turned on by default on the list pages. Clicking a row in the table displays detailed information about the selected item in the panel, which partially covers the table. The overlay panel option can be disabled by the user.
In the survey, almost every user pointed out as a major bottleneck that the software was working very slowly. As s main reason, they had pointed to complex navigation and the need to enter too much data when creating a new entity. Most often they gave as an example of creating a candidate profile in the system where email, phone, and language were mandatory fields, and for some of them, the recruiters did not even have information. With the help of recruiters from all departments, we chose fields to be hidden and significantly reduced the number of required fields by grouping them into sections that can be added dynamically.
