Workrise
Workrise is the leading job placement and career-building resource for skilled laborers. It helps workers find work, get paid, and get the training they need. It enables energy industry companies to empower workers in oil and gas, solar and wind. Its solution has expanded into equipment and vendor management, as well as on-demand, app-based service fulfillment, bringing cost savings, and operational efficiencies to energy companies across the United States.
Workrise was founded in 2014. In 2021, Workrise raised $300 million in Series E funding.
Role & Duration
St. Product designer
2021 - 2022
Deliverables
Discovery workshops
Wireframes
Design
Platform
Desktop
Phone - iOS / Android
The Projects
These are the projects designed for the workplace team at Workrise. The target audiences are workers and clients in the oil and gas field across the US.
Business Goals
The short-term goal is to reduce cost per worker. The long-term goal is to increase active users to 1 million by 2030.
The Challenges
The product team has to communicate with many operation teams in an old industry; most of the users are low-tech; company is in a period of fast growth and change.
Case study 1: Onboarding (Admin + Worker app)
What: Automate and track worker onboarding process
Result: Decreased Workrise cost per worker and created market-compatible user experience for workers
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Streamlined admin/worker relationship. All admins can now adopt any worker's onboarding process.
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Easy for Admin to prioritize the tasks every day
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Enabled email tracking: conversations with workers, and workers' responses
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Collected data on every step for future improvement
What: A worker onboarding page to show all the tasks that workers need to complete before their first day of work
Hypothesis Result: The feature will create an easier process for workers to track and complete all of the important tasks prior to starting work. This increases worker compliance with WR criteria.
How:
1. Visualized process with illustrated storyboards. Doing so, identified onboarding pain points, inspired operation teams’ empathy, and aligned different teams to work on onboarding process improvement
2. Hosted problem defining workshops, Identified pain points from unorganized process diagrams and found better solutions
3. Created diagram while discovering the pain points
Design System:
1. Conducted design system workshops to ensure the team was aligned
2. Created, re-organized and improved design system along with the project progresses
3. Improved the communication between design and engineer teams
Case study 2: Dashboard (Client app)
What: A project to identify opportunities for O&G product growth, and build tests for quick real-life validation from users
Result: Demonstrated fresh methods for testing new features, and for a data-oriented decision-making process
How:
1. Since leadership's goal was very vague, simply just client growth. Our 3 people team (PM, Design, and Eng) started over exploration and interviews in order to figure out the framework and priorities
2. After communicating with the leadership, we shrink down the focus to 1 experience with 3 different approaches. We started to advocate bringing valuable dashboards to clients to increase sales and increase the value of the product. Working closely with eng and data analyst building the dashboard.
3. First time using painted door test at Workrise, try to bridge the feedback loop for clients by using instant survey, booking system and email.
Case study 3: Universal account creating and login
What: A login system for different types of O&G users
Result: Recreated a seamless login process, along with decreased troubleshooting time for operation teams
How:
1. Initially, there was no clear user flow and relationship between Monolith and TXP users. I began identifying the main problems and different levels of pain points
2. Identified clear milestones with PM
Case study 4: Tooltips: In-app education (UX improvement)
What: A project to improve job sheet submission experience and unloaded work pressure from the op and engineer team during the surge of job sheet submission
Result: Job sheet submission help tickets are trending down 10% after launching the new change in a month
How:
1. Define the existing problem of the flow, and discuss possible solutions with PM and eng
2. Define new UX flow and design
Reflection:
This project was implemented under a very tight timeline. I was pleased to see a positive result, given the short timeframe.
Case study 5: Northstar project
What: With the separation of oil & gas and construction fields' work, I feel the urge to create a workshop to bring both teams together to brainstorm for company's northstart concepts. The project was focusing on what new areas we can stand out in constraction field as a workforce company.
Result: Finished facilitating 5 days workshop for both oil & gas and marketplace teams, created 2 basic concepts and possibilities for future training and metoring concept at Workrise
How:
Facilitated 5 days (2 hours/day) workshops. First, we set up goals, constraints, and user persona. Then we started looking at the existing features and what is missing. In the end, we did a deep dive into the problems, and proposed different solutions.
Final thoughts:
1. Programmers have many technical solutions which can serve the product's goal. It is beneficial to communicate with programmers on a regular basis.
2. The scope of the project, as outlined by the VP, was overly ambitious. When presented with unrealistic expectations, designers must voice concern backed up with data, so that alternative solutions can be considered.
Case study 6: Workrise culture hackathon
What: A hackathon to figure out how might we improve Workrise's culture
Result: Demonstrated the importance of employees' self-growth, how it will affect work and the working environment. Our team won the "Moonshot" prize.
How: After a company-wide survey, we noticed self-growth was lacking. Since the hackathon only lasted 2 days, we created scenarios to demonstrate how employees can learn from each other and mentor on a new company-wide platform.
Reflection:
I am glad I can contribute to Workrise's culture improvement through the hackathon. The project was completed in spite of everyone's busy schedule. I feel lucky to be part of a team where everyone was passionate about the project and worked persistently through completion. Special thanks to Lara Long and Mitchell Thomson.