Work / HUDDLE App

Huddle

9 mins. read

UX Design

User Research

This was a project in collaboration with Hello xLab. A team of 5 designers worked on presenting the hiring flow over 4 months.

Timeline
Jan 2021 - Apr 2021
Client
HELLO xLAB
My Contribution
Product Management • Design • Research
Deliverables
Research plan • User interviews and analysis • Lo-Fi Wireframes • Prototype
Team members
Asiya Atcha • Drashya Gohil • Humaira Imtiyaz Vicky Liang Zhouquan Peng
View prototype
Huddle App Cover

Some context

Project managers, talent acquisition leaders and entrepreneurs often struggle to find promising talents and support to execute a project. With the lack of trustworthy facts on existing recruiting platforms, finding the right talent can be time-consuming.

Hence, the goal was to create a centralized platform that brings together people and businesses to engage on projects globally aided by AI to show promising talents for collaboration (think tinder but for professionals seeking to work together).




Research


The big question

How might a recruitment app deliver match accuracy and demonstrate real value in assessing person-to-project fit?


Competitive Analysis

We looked at some of our friendly neighbours like LinkedIn, Indeed, Toptal

  • Realized they were unintuitive for recruiters
  • Manually writing job descriptions, lengthy forms to fill and plethora of questions to answer before actually looking at potential candidates. Doesn't really sound convenient.

compariiveon-linkedin-indeed-toptal

Job posting flows for 1-LinkedIn 2-Indeed 3-Toptal


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.



Thinking about the stakeholders

Our partners at Hello xLab were kind enough to provide us with potential audience that we wanted to build the product for. Categorizing these stakeholders into four key profiles helped us understand the pain points better.


Planners

Public sector departments, chamber of commerce, trade organizations, private sector

Donors

Individuals, startups, grad students and think tanks

Doers

Business/organizations seeking projects/people to fund

Thinkers

Private sector businesses



THE RESEARCH PLAN

One of the first things we did as a team was write our research plan, keeping with the recommendations in IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking Toolkit. Some of the benefits we had by following this;

Writing it helped us to define our goals and identify our desired learning outcomes

It kept us organized as one of the requirements was a timeline for the project


We used it to identify our desired study participants and create a screener for suitable candidates

We were able to formulate our research questions and pair them with suitable evaluation tools

research plan showing interview insights and schedules

Interviews & Insights

Conducting remote interviews of about 9 participants was my initital learning experience in doing ethnographic user research. Our team paired up in groups of two, alternating between taking notes and asking questions to cover the four categories of users. The following were some of the important highlights

We are usually looking for people who complement team's weaknesses.

Soft skills > Hard skills.

Lack of consistency in job postings.




Define

What's the problem?

How might a recruitment app deliver match accuracy and demonstrate real value in assessing person-to-project fit?


User Personas

For the scope of this project, our team decided to address the needs of the planners profile of users. Another constraint I noticed was the end product we would build would primarily used by talent seekers and not the actual talents themselves. This meant creating two different products and hence, we decided to focus on the recruiting module. We referred the following user personas often to remind ourselves of the pain-points and needs.

Details about the first persona

User Persona 1 - Mike Portnoy / Project Manager

Huddle App Cover

User Persona 2 - Phyllis Smith / Creative Director


User Flow

Iterating on the user flow for discoverability of candidates in a hiring process. This is in the perspective of the recruiter.

Rough sketches of each team member's ideas

User flow based on sprint meets discussing the hiring flow




Ideate

Crazy 8s

Since it was the first hands-on project for majority of the group members, I decided to use the “crazy 8” method to do some quick and dirty concept drafting which we learned in one of our courses. We voted on some of the useful screens that we could bring into our medium fidelity prototype by pinning a square on each sketch.

Rough sketches of each team member's ideas

Quick prototype sketches by each team member, made under a minute


Low-Fidelity

finalised low-fidelity wireframe sketch

A low-fidelity sketch we combined from the best ideas that were voted on




Prototype

Usabilty 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.

Rough sketches of each team member's ideas

Medium fidelity prototype exploring how a planner adds a new role to the team


Style Tile

Style tile for the Huddle app

A small style guide we maintained for consistency in the high-fidelity design




Iterate

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.

feedback grid

Feedback grid to prioritise what points to include in the final prototype.


High Fidelity Prototype

Style tile for the Huddle app

The finalised screens for the hiring flow




Retrospectives & Takeaways

Although the end product was just a small part of the whole experience, I personally believe a lot could have been improved. I have mentioned a few points that I am curious to explore in the future;

  • Continue to reiterate and execute solutions for other issues like candidate onboarding
  • Complete a full end-to-end user experience for all types of stakeholders
  • Implement a design system to make design execution more efficient

With that said, I thoroughly enjoyed collaborating on this project and work with other designers. Applying research methodologies and converting them into usable designs proved to be a learning experience.