Mimo’s value comes from being able to scale a business’s labor workforce up or down, architected around serving that core value. I was tasked with taking Mimo’s paper processes and extending the product to allow real-time hiring, chat communication and scheduling — turning Mimo’s asynchronous communication lines into an easy to use app.
As the Lead Product Designer, I’m in charge of the UX research, UI design and prototyping.
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Flaggers
Cleanup Crew
Painters
Traffic Control techs
Gatekeepers
Pipefitters
Pipefitters
Site maintenance
Plumbers
Maids
Servers
Hosts
Parking attendants
Janitors
Banquet and restaurant servers
Event caterers
Prep cooks
Dishwashers
Being tasked with extending the product was a large under taking. We needed a process to quickly get stakeholder and user feedback to determine the value of our offerings. This was accomplished with early and continous user feedback and clear business goals.
One of the business goals was to fulfill gaps in the market. I knew there were several gaps in the market, but i needed a clearer view of what those were, so I approached the possible solutions with a broad outlook and started with market research. The list included 11 competing entry-level flexible staffing platforms and businesses that offered mobile and desktop apps. I dug deep into their services, social media and reviews.
We tested a high fidelity protype with 16 business partners. Our goals were to understand the challenges employers faced and the workarounds they employed.
It turns out that there’s a user expectation of how these types of UI’s operate, but the market has not been very accomadating to these standards. It’s a huge opportunity for us to create value. My solution was to design a “standard” app that included delightfully familiar details that made it uniquely Mimo.
We tested a high fidelity protype with business partners that were experiencing the pain points we were addressing. Our goals were to understand the challenges employers faced and the workarounds they employed.
Employeers were annoyed when they needed to retain talent on short notice. Often they would have to abide by office hours, restricted contact methods, and first time users were required to go through a slow onboarding process, often taking over 48 hours.
Employeers needed the ability to set their own terms of employment. Meaning, they wanted to select who the workers are, not be assigned a worker. They want to set their own pay rate, sometimes higher than market, sometimes lower than market. Overall they wanted more autonomy for their employeer and worker relatinoship.
Often, workers did not arrive at the exact location or jobsite, this was especially true for jobs that did not have an office space such as in construct, farm workers or moving specialists.
The main reason employers would use a staffing solution was to alleviate demand on their current workforce. Wether it be the lack of a HR process, or to reduce the workload of their active workforce. Other reasons were costs of hiring and retaining employees, access to talent networks, short term staff needs, reducing hiring risks, zero onboarding or payroll responsibilities.
We knew that our users are small businesses with 1-10 jobs active at a time. Their entire operation might only have 20 employees total. So we optimized for the small businesses, but didn’t punish them for using us at a higher level. This came into the conversation when going through the discovery phase on how to present the life cycle of jobs a user might have. Whats the best way for them to get a high level view of what is going on?
As our key focus was the “ Create_Job” flow, realizing this may be feature heavy, we proceeded to check feasibility and ideate with developers...
Taking a very inclusive approach, I involved engineers and leadership at every turn — making sure everything we produced was technically viable but also represented the direction the company and industry was headed.
After collaborating with teams mates to get a quick view of the sites flow and architecture, I mapped the information architecture of the module we are focusing on by making a sitemap. Below is the section we are focusing on, but the site map extends 7x beyond this.
An interesting part of this project was how businesses would acquire talent - which until this point has been done through job posts, emails, phone calls and tedious communication methods. These are all bottlenecks. So we need to answer this: How does hiring happen? How could we keep clients focused on their business and not stuck in an ATS or reading resumes? How do we keep an open line of communication with our clients without forcing them into a long email thread or back and forth phone calls? How do we relieve all the bottlenecks without losing quality?
As a labor workforce supplier, the majority of our workers would always be on site for onboarding and to complete a job. But what about getting them details before arrival? What if the manager wants to connect after the employee leaves? What if this is a remote position? This is where we introduced chat to allow for real time collaboration. Sure... many apps have chat, but none in our industry are currently implementing this feature, so this was a positive way to differentiate ourselves from the competition.
A big part of my approach was sketching, prototyping and feedback.
Thorough documentation is needed for each module. Many of the developers involved in the project were new and required education to understand the infrastructure and purpose behind the system. I built a quick guide for common areas that people were struggling with. This helped make sure there was no confusion, and everyone was on the same page.
The final iterations were well received by stakeholders and users.
The interplay between chat and job_id, emails and user permissions wasn’t glamorous — but in the end we were able to build a useful tool for small businesses. We will continue to test, iterate and improve.