Role - Senior Experience Designer
I lead the visual design, contributed to research and user experience through user interview participation, wireframing, and prototyping. I also worked a systems designer and engineers to create a robust design system that provided guidance for future platform improvements.
Tools
Sketch, Abstract, Zeplin, Invision
Timeline
March 2019 - Sept 2019
The Problem
Thrive’s platform needed to grow in order to accommodate the enterprise market
Thrive originally built their Talent Relationship Management(TRM) product to accommodate staffing. Since their inception, Thrive has experienced substantial growth, and they anticipated even greater adoption as they penetrated new markets. While the current product incorporates many, if not all, of the features necessary to handle staffing and enterprise clients, there are inconsistencies in the interaction model and overall usability issues they wanted to remedy as they scale.
The Solution
A holistic design system that unifies the user experience
We designed an atomic experience system that can evolve with user and business needs. The new system gave their engineering team guiding principles when creating the pages we designed and expanding the new visual language through the rest of the platform.
“The new layout is a more streamlined view of our data and allows us to more easily get an overview of our candidates.”
— Stakeholder
Stakeholder Interviews
Atomic Design System
Wireframes
UI Design
User Research
To understand the challenge, the team reviewed the current Thrive platform, spoke to stakeholders about their goals of the redesign, and interviewed end users to identify their biggest pain points.
5
10
3
Design Validation Sessions
In-Depth Interviews
Stakeholder Workshops
Design System
Things were getting noisy and lacked conventions and standards. Thrive wanted to take a step back and reevaluate, consider their brand, come up with a design language, and create components and a structure that engineers could use easily, without the help of in-house designers.
Components
10
Templates
30+
Modules
100+
Atoms, Molecules, Organisms
To streamline their production process, my team developed an organized sketch library for design elements, and another for layouts, spacing conventions, and documentation.
Understanding who these solutions are for
The research suggested that the users found Thrive to be a powerful talent management technology but they wanted more robust tools within the platform for parsing and organizing data.
Search Firms
Enhance client collaboration, improve search team efficiency, and effectively track the business development pipeline.
Executive Recruiters
Make better decisions faster and seamlessly organize research to gain a global view of talent across industries, sectors, and functions.
VC/PE Firms
Capture search-generated market intelligence, share other resources across the firm’s entire ecosystem, and get all their talent data in one accessible resource.
Production
Working with the team and stakeholders, we identified two major areas that could be great starting points for implementing the design system we created: Candidates, Companies, and Contacts. We wanted to stress test the design system, find functionality and content gaps, and identify edge cases. During the production process, we consolidated typographic styles, removed duplicate elements, and further honed the system we created.
Advanced Search Panel
Goal: A search panel that makes it easier to select filters, networks, and saved views.
The new Network drop-down menu allows users to select prebuilt lists of contacts, companies, or searches. Users can also edit which columns they want to display and export their view as a CSV.
Bulk Tagging
Goal: A feature that speeds up workflow by allowing you to manage multiple candidate’s at once.
With bulk tagging, users can quickly add tags to multiple records. Users can also add multiple contacts to their Networks.
Candidate Profile
Goal: Users needed a candidate profile that was easily editable and had all of the information they needed in one place.
Recruiters have a holistic view of the communication history with this candidate, and can add to this page easily when there is an update to a role, or additional information about the candidate was needed.
Activity
Goal: Provide a section in the candidate profile that has all communications in one place
The activity section of the candidate profile provides all the information that a recruiter has acquired throughout discussions with the candidate. This is a comprehensive section of each touchpoint throughout the hiring process, easily accessed via the profile.
Searches
Goal: A section of the candidate profile that shows their current status of their current job searches.
With an area to quickly update the stage at which a candidate is at, recruiters were able to keep an eye on the activity within each potential role and reach out accordingly.
Sidebar
Goal: A collaborative section of the page that holds all of the most important information when interacting and evaluating a candidate.
While a user can tab through the different sections of the profile, the information in the sidebar remains static for quick reference. If the recruiter is collaborating with a colleague and they didn’t update this information themselves, they can see when this information was last updated so they know how accurate and timely it is.
Off-limits
Goal: A tag near the candidate’s name showing if a person is interested in new opportunities, or available.
One experience we wanted to update was the “contractual off limits” badge underneath the candidate’s name. In the previous design, it was buried or held no visual hierarchy. We placed the tag next to their name, and depending on severity, the color could range from orange to red.
Experience
Goal: An area of the profile that can store information from a candidate’s resume or CV.
This area serves as a quick reference to what experience this candidate has and how it applies to the role(s) they could be placed in.
Contacts
The bulk of our efforts when it came to organizing information, was in the Contacts page. Pages and pages of contacts had to be organized in a way that was scannable, digestible, and searchable. Utilizing a robust search feature, filtering in the table, and pagination, we created an experience that made it easier for recruiters to find, select, and organize candidates.
Results
Our improvements launched in April 2021. From significant user experience updates and bulk actions to fully customizable reports, this major product update helped users track, find, and share their search and network details. A complete index page redesign and platform-wide color and font updates help users quickly access contact, company, and search data. The new Contacts page includes color-coded Off Limits indicators that can be clicked and expanded to display more information on off limits statuses.
25,000+
Searches in 2022
+53%
Opened searches
+18%
Search velocity
“The new bulk action features are incredibly helpful in managing our ability to execute on searches more quickly and to capture information that enables us to be more efficient.”
— Stakeholder
