Hireup
As Hireup's first product and design specialist, I automated the slow parts of a fast-growing marketplace, so their people could spend their time on people.
The role at a glance
- Business
- An online platform where people with disability find, hire and manage support workers who suit them, with booking, messaging and payroll in one place. A Deloitte Fast 50 company in 2017.
- Hired to
- Bring product and design to a company in a period of major growth, automating manual processes so staff could give more personal service on both sides of the marketplace.
- Key wins
- A faster, clearer registration and approval path, a self-managing system for worker compliance documents, a rethink of support plans, and a UX team hired from the community.
- Moved on
- In 2018, to lead a ground-up product refactor at SkoolBag.
Support that fits the person
Hireup lets people with disability choose their own support workers: by location, by the kind of help they need, and by shared interests. Communication, booking and payroll all happen in one place. Founded in 2015, it grew quickly beyond the traditional disability sector and was named in Deloitte's Fast 50 in 2017.
Both sides of the marketplace were often new to this. Many clients were learning to manage their own support for the first time, and many workers were entering the sector for the first time.
Automate the process, keep the personal service
As the first product and design specialist, I was asked to automate the manual work that slowed growth, so head-office staff could spend their time on personal service instead. I worked with a varied group of non-technical stakeholders to turn the company's vision into a roadmap.
Find the bottlenecks, then design them away
Learn from the community
I worked with clients, families and workers to find the use cases common to the sector and the ones unique to it, and studied service workflows to map where people were likely to stall.
Prioritise what blocks growth
I identified the key bottlenecks to growth and prioritised automating the manual processes behind them, designing each fix to roll out in stages for the most impact and the least disruption.
Grow the team from the community
As the company expanded, I hired a researcher and a junior designer from the disability community and brought them into how we built the product.
The work, in detail
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Support plans, evolved
Replacing a long, clinical document with details shared step by step, as trust grows.
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Automating documentation
A compliance system that tracks its own checklists and asks workers to renew before anything lapses.
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Expediting onboarding
Approval took anywhere from a week to over a month. Finding out why, and fixing the slowest part.
On to the next refactor
By the time I left, support workers were onboarded dramatically faster, far fewer of their documents were rejected, and the team spent much less time keeping track of documents and their status. I moved on in October 2018 to SkoolBag, to help rethink a product used by schools across Australia from the ground up.