Stint

Objective

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The objective was to transform an idea into an application for iOS and Android. A secondary goal was to develop the design, brand, and product within four months and deliver it to the developers.

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Design Process

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Discover - How are we approaching the problem?

Define - What did we learn? Where are we going?

Design - How would this look and work?

Deliver - Will this work in real life?

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Problem Statement

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"How can we gain a competitive advantage by developing a mobile app that matches businesses with short-term workers based on specific times and preferences, addressing the challenges of high staff costs for businesses and irregular schedules for workers?"

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Interviews

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After conducting a series of interviews with the founders, I gained a deep understanding the problem, market, solution, target group and mission. Being a recent university graduate, I was able to approach the situation from a student’s perspective.

In addition to internal interviews, I also conducted a series of interviews with external stakeholders, such as cafe and restaurant owners (businesses). This enabled me to understand the pains/blockers of businesses when it comes to hiring and finding staff.

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Key user stories

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• As a business, I want to find short term workers without having to spent hours and money in a time-consuming screening process.
• As a business, I want to hire staff for specific time slots based on my irregular staff calendar.
• As a business, I want to rapidly hire staff from a pool of available workers.
• As a student, I want to share my availability without having to apply for multiple roles.
• As a student, I want to work flexible hours without committing to a long term engagement.

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Key How Might We Questions

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• How might we speed up the process of matching a worker with a role?
• How might we pre-screen workers before they apply to roles?
• How might we assure business of a certain quality level in worker skillset?
• How might we enable users to easily share their availability?
• How might we create a sense of community?
• How might we increase the number of Stints (short term roles) a user takes on per week?
• How might we engage the user to return to the platform regularly?

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More Methods

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• User Scenarios helped us to understand the needs, pains, motivations, intentions and actions of both students and businesses.
• “A day in the life” exercises helped us to understand user flows in specific situations, such as businessperson working or a student studying.
• Competitor analysis enabled all internal stakeholders to understand current user experiences and identify potential areas for improvement.
• Best in class analysis provided insight to how role finding and hiring were functioning via mobile apps.
• When things became quiet chaotic, I decided to group everything by topic. This allowed us to find clarity in the collected start the process of defining our approach.
• Sketching ideas and speaking to internal and external stakeholders became the daily habit for several weeks.

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Iterations

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Stint Mobile Interface for Matching Businesses Based on Availability

Stint was conceptualized as matching platform that, once all preferences and availabilities have been added, automatically suggests new roles - with the intention to quickly start working and earning money.

With this being the case, I first sketched a availability-focused interface with potential to expand beyond scheduling. The first version featured searching for roles based on preferences, a profile to earn badges and planner for setting availabilities.

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Early Feedback

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Feedback from early users indicated that they felt overwhelmed by the multiple options to find a role and were unsure of what to look for and what to specify in their profile to get more roles. If we wanted to bring the core of the app the matchmaking to the forefront, we would need to simplify features to be more user-friendly.

This led me to rethink what the layout of a matchmaking app should be and reduce the interface to first onboard workers and then focus on availability with access to the next upcoming role.

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Design Language

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Since the company had no corporate identity to serve as foundation for building a UI design language on, we defined values to create a direction we wanted to pursue. Here are some of the values we defined: Stand for professionalism, Power by people, Make everyone a employer.

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Key Features & Final Deliverables

A mobile app for scheduling part time work • Workers

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With a calendar inspired too, we are able to deliver a quick scheduling experience that could be accessed from anywhere in the app. It features a button for the most important user flow for job seekers.

Tapping the logo brings up the options to set availability or activate on demand availability anywhere in the app. This increases the amount of availabilities added per user and results in businesses having a larger pool of workers to select from.

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STINT Check-in/Check-out Card • Workers

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Working for multiple employers per week results in the challenge of being onboarded to multiple work environments with specific workflows and guidelines. To focus on the most important next part-time role we created the Stint Card. It serves as the central hub for all relevant information, guidelines, dress codes and rules that a student receives before starting work. Users can easily check in and check out with the tap of a button.

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What can I help you with?

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In most cases restaurant and café owners are actively involved in daily business operations while simultaneously managing administrative tasks like finding new staff. In the UK the average employment length restaurants staff is 52 days, we aim to create a Google-like experience for finding workers very quickly.

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Post a Stint for a Fixed Rate and Time

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With a set of predefined roles, we created standards that workers must meet for certain roles. This streamlined the process of posting a role and increased the rate of successfully fulfilling the required tasks for each role. Payment and taxation were all managed by Stint, which, reduced the time businesses had to spend dealing with continuous worker turnover.

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Launch of the App!

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This was a very special moment in my early days as a designer. In addition to working closely with the Founders, which I have to mention was not always a walk in the park, I also had the opportunity to manage multiple weeks of sprints and experience what it's like to be a product manager under time pressure. The app has since developed and strengthened its core function of matching workers with businesses.

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Key Takeaways & Reflection

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Before joining Stint, I had worked on specific parts of product user experience and interface design. My understanding of launching an app with the goal of attracting users and securing investments for scaling was quite limited. Therefore when I was tasked with designing the initial user experience for workers to find part-time roles and businesses to find workers, it pushed me to learn about the matchmaking process, often referred to as the "chicken and egg problem." The lessons I learned during that time continue to inform my work.

A final note: Be open to learning from the past. Embrace what has worked and continue to simplify.