Focus
This was a solo project completed as part of my UX/UI Design course at BrainStation. My task was to identify a problem and design a minimum viable product. The project was completed in 8 weeks.
The Problem
How might we help film and TV producers reduce the stress of recruiting the right crew members for their team?
Introduction
During my previous career in the tv and film industry, I noticed a trend of managers who hired for tv and film productions would struggle and stress over finding crew members for their shoots. Due to the short term nature of the employment and the number of crew members needed for a production, traditional hiring practices of interviews and resumes are not used within the industry.
Research
I wanted to make sure I had defined the right problem to solve. While I was in charge of several aspects of the shoots, I was not responsible for hiring crew members. I decided to perform some research to understand the user’s pain points and make sure I was addressing them. I decided to send out a survey to get qualitative data on what managers were looking for in their crew members. I also interviewed 5 managers to understand what exactly was stressful about hiring and see how I could provide a solution to save time and effort.
Survey
The goal of the survey was to uncover what managers were looking for in their crew members. I provided a list of 25 personality traits, as well as the ability to input their own, and asked managers to pick the top 5 traits they looked for in their crew members. I received 27 responses and 6 personality traits were picked at a much higher rate than others. Surprisingly, those 6 traits were personality-driven, not skill-related.
Survey results
Interview
With the knowledge I gained in the survey, I began to understand why hiring was stressful and began to figure out where design and technology could make an impact. I spoke with 5 different managers and through speaking with them, I gained more thorough insights which identify more specific problems.
Since days on set, are an average of 12-14 hours, having crew members that work well together makes the day feel to go by faster
Finding crew members starts with asking people who you have worked with previously, however, most times you eventually have to reach out to people you haven’t worked with
On average you start hiring about three weeks before the production starts and need to hire about 20-30 crew members
Often when you are hiring for a job that is shorter in amount of days, someone who has already agreed to work with you may decline if they are offered something longer
Hiring can be done up until the day before the production
Defining scope
With the limited amount of time I had and to be able to test this out, I tried to define an MVP. Using the knowledge gained in the research, I started by visualizing my users to mapped out their experience. I highlighted a few main pain points and possible opportunities that I could address in my solution. I then created a task flow to make sure I had logically mapped out my solution and had the right screens to cover my proposed solution.
How can we empower managers to make better-informed hiring decisions?
I realized this is the main problem we are trying to solve. Managers would inevitably need to hire people they don’t know and the risk of hiring the wrong person results to a miserable day for the entire crew. While I addressed some of the other pain points through my flow, I wanted to elaborate on how I tried to solve this problem.
Inspirations
I took a look at other applications and how they handled a similar situation whether it was within the industry like LinkedIn to even a travel booking site like Airbnb. I looked for a wide array of applications that provided a way to share information that helps the user make large decisions. Deciding on the right way to learn about potential crew members as well as differentiate between candidates were important pain points to address correctly. I listed out the pros and cons of different approaches and ended up settling on endorsements.
LinkedIn endorsements allow users to learn what skills a candidate might have which others have vouched for but because there is no restriction on who can endorse or how many skills can be endorsed, it actually provides very little value.
Airbnb
Airbnb allows users to view a star rating. It creates an extremely easy way for someone to come back and leave a review and provides a qualitative way to compare listings. However, star ratings can be very vague and there may be discrepancies in what people consider different ratings mean.
Solution
I had to balance the amount of information to present about a crew member and the likelihood of a manager coming back and providing an assessment of the crew member after the job has been completed. I ended up going with a modified version of endorsements, and I decided to limit endorsements to the personality traits that I found to be valuable to managers in my survey. This allowed the important characteristics of the crew member to be available first. To ensure that these endorsements would be valuable, I limited the ability for a manager to endorse someone only after they had hired them as well as only one endorsement per job. To make endorsing someone extremely easy, I decided to serve a notification to the manager after the job to come back into the application and leave an endorsement. To reduce any friction to the manager, I decided to present them with the same list of traits or the option not to endorse the crew member on the same screen.
Iteration and testing
I performed 2 rounds of user testing to gather insights on my designs and to see if they were helping managers be able get enough useful information to help in their hiring decisions. During my testing of the search results page and profile page I found that I could improve where I showed the information as well as providing valuable information to users.
Search Results Page
On the first round of testing users generally felt that it was tedious to go into each profile to get a sense of who the crew member was and no overview to directly compare some candidates. For my next iteration I decided to surface some of the available information to help user differentiate between candidates.
On the second round of testing, users were happy to see more information about candidates and the ability to sort the list. This allowed them to quickly be able to compare candidates before diving deep into their profiles. Users had a hard time figuring out that they could click into the profiles. I decided to add a shadow to add to the affordance of the card link.
Profile Page
During the first round of user testing the users felt the information felt disconnected. While I wanted to provide more information about the endorsements users didn’t really see the value. For the next iteration I decided to simplify some of the information and group the items that could be grouped.
When I tested this users were more clear with the information shown but user’s felt like we could provide more details about the crew member. On the next version I decided to add a space for a short bio so the user could tell more about themselves.
Final Designs
Search Results Page
Profile Page
Conclusion
This project helped me understand the importance of solving the right problem. I started off the project with a very open ended problem and while it did cover some of the pain points of my potential user, I didn’t think it went deep enough. Once I re framed my problem, I was able to clearly build specific features related to help solve it. If I were to work on this project again, I would explore what the flow would look like from the crew members’ point of view. What are their pain points and how can I help them find work?