WORK MARKET

Embracing Material Design & Very, Very Agile

In the fall of 2015, Work Market approached me to lead the design of an all-new native smartphone app for Android. Providing a contingent workforce recruiting, workflow management and billing platform, Work Market connects employers with on-demand talent.

The desktop application was already a robust, functionality-rich experience. In advance of undertaking a responsive redesign, Work Market had created a mobile Web version of its platform that "worker" users could access via a native app wrapper on smartphones. With a substantial portion of its business anchored in the provision of on-site information technology services, Work Market's contingent worker audience were heavy Android users. 

I was the first hire into the mobile team. While we scouted for additional talent, I undertook an audit of the existing experience, while coming up to speed on Material Design.

The audit required me to operate as both an employer and a worker in order to capture the interactions between the two in the process of offering and completing an assignment. It paved the way for identifying navigational improvements for the Android design, and to start thinking about native enhancements. At the same time, knowing that an iOS app would quickly follow, I looked for patterns that would translate well across platforms.

While I was based in NYC, by January 2016 the full mobile team had been hired and was situated in Toronto. Now we were working, in one-week Agile sprints, toward an MVP release in April! Within this tight timeline, I conducted several collaborative design sessions with the team, and found opportune windows for user research:

• January user survey: Coordinating with the Customer Support and Client Services teams, I dispatched a survey collecting details about user context and desired features; the survey had a 2% response rate and yielded a list of volunteers for subsequent prototype testing. 
• February prototype walkthrough: Volunteers from the January survey were invited for an unmoderated walkthrough of our Invision prototype, followed by a survey. 

With iOS in mind, I advocated for a bottom global navigation bar (subsequently, Google added this to the Material spec), and began working my way through the MVP user stories, continually prioritizing with our product manager. Lacking documentation for the existing experience, the design required a great deal of reverse engineering and chats with backend engineers. We adhered to Material, with a few customizations to add personality and zing.

One week being a short timeframe for design, even for the smallest feature, I quickly found that for me two weeks worked well: the first to produce and review a design, and the second to finalize and deliver specs. And in April 2016, Work Market for Android was launched!