Basecamp Outdoor provides hiring and job-seeking services to make working in the outdoor industry more accessible and equitable for newcomers and industry vets.
Opportunity
What started as a network of professionals has evolved into a company that serves over 300K users. With this growth, admins have struggled to manage internal workflows and with the launch of a new service, we anticipate their workload will be even more time-consuming, costly, and overwhelming.
Results and Impact
I worked with the founders and development team, in an agile environment.
I designed an internal administrator tool that automated various processes and integrated third-party APIs, making it more efficient to manage workflows across all of Basecamp’s offerings.
Our team feels more confident and prepared to handle the influx of users when our services launch. We are also set up to scale the dashboard as we continue to make design and operational refinements.
DEFINING GOALS
How Can the Team Meet New Demands?
Our team was in the process of building new user-authenticated services for job seekers and hiring managers to scale existing offerings, which would increase the amount of data that needs to be managed internally.
We knew that with our current processes, our already overwhelmed administrators would face an even greater workload.
I worked with the company founders to strategize how to meet the demands of the new services and define our measures of success.
Learning What’s Technically Feasible
With the development of the new products, we integrated several new platforms into our tech stack. I met with the developers to see if any of these platforms could automate some of the admin tasks.
The tasks that could not be automated by pre-existing tools gave me insight into potential opportunities for impact.
RESEARCH
What are the Admins’ Current Workflows?
I spoke to team members responsible for admin work, which included the founders, to get a breakdown of how they currently completed their primary tasks, their pain points, and how their workload might change when the new products are released.
Through a series of workshops with them, I outlined the user flows for each of their tasks that could not be automated to get a comprehensive picture of the current steps they take and the tools they use.
Key Issues
MAKING DECISIONS
What Are My Design Priorities?
From the research, I concluded that many admin tasks were causing cognitive overload, and the available tools hindered their ability to complete tasks accurately and efficiently. I focused on these areas for improvement.
How can I reduce the number of touchpoints when managing jobs and provide customization to organize critical data up until real-time updates?
DESIGNS
What is the Solution?
I was new to designing internal tools so I looked at similar systems to learn best practices for filtering large sets of data, handling many different status changes, and structural organization of different functionalities.
I worked closely with the team throughout this stage, conducting working sessions and design reviews, which allowed me to quickly ideate and iterate on designs.
USABILITY TESTING
How Can We Refine the Experience?
Being in an Agile environment, I had the opportunity to continuously test and improve the experience.
Due to technical constraints with grouped tasks appearing in the correct queue order, and admin feedback that they were difficult to work with, I reworked the system to show boosts individually by duplicating the job listing for each purchased boost.
Admins also needed an extra verification step after completing boost-related tasks. Previously, listings moved from pending to complete once marked done. To address this, I added an active status where listings either move to complete automatically based on the date or require a second mark as done action.
QUALITY ASSURANCE
How Do We Assess Performance?
Once various parts of the dashboard were live, I frequently met with the admin team to continue gathering feedback, make iterations, and move on to implement additional features. I also worked closely with the developers to document bugs and usability issues.
In monitoring how workflows changed for admins, I learned that they could complete their tasks faster with little to no frustration, reducing the number of spreadsheets from 9 to 1.
Reflection
Challenges
Designing in an iterative, nimble environment was challenging at times because it allowed the team to suggest ideas that addressed different needs they wanted to be incorporated. As a result, it sometimes felt like I was cramming features in and going back and forth to add or remove elements, rather than designing the interface holistically.
The founders valued visual aesthetics, which was at odds with the goal of the tool, as it was meant to focus on efficiency and productivity. I had to ensure that visually pleasing elements did not interfere with usability, so I stuck to using the brand colors wherever possible to maintain simplicity and avoid over-designing the dashboard.
What If…
During this project, I did not consider how a new user would be onboarded and the impact that would have had on the design. While I am not sure if our platform is complex enough yet to warrant an onboarding process, it would have been valuable to at least have that discussion.
One thing I wish we had done was evaluate how long the primary tasks took using metrics. I assumed that reducing the number of touchpoints and cognitive load would reduce completion time so it would have been valuable to validate that. There's a chance that the updated workflows had no effect or even increased completion time.
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