SASR provides thousands of job opportunities for retail workers across the US. Their proprietary software solution, Hireflex, allows workers to find the jobs they want and, when assigned a job, provides them with directions, instructions, self-check-in, and timesheet submissions.
Challenges with bad actors
Workers were required to submit their own timesheets using either the Hireflex mobile app or by calling a central number. To combat fraud, a geofencing feature had been added to the app, but it had proven to be unreliable, resulting in a lot of manual overhead for account managers verifying timesheets. Honest workers were encountering delays in pay because a few workers abused the system.
SASR engaged Vaporware to design a solution to simplify the timesheet approval process so workers can get paid daily and realign the responsibility of verifying worker presence from the centralized office to the on-site supervisors. In addition, this would help SASR move towards centralizing timesheet and worker performance data, eliminating account managers’ reliance on manual spreadsheets.
Designing a new approach
Since SASR’s own team would be tackling the development of this initiative, we focused on what the experience should be through our Prototype service.
User Story Map
We began with a kickoff meeting to understand the users of the solution, what their goals would be, and how they might want to achieve those goals.
From there we worked with the SASR team to create a user story map. We love this method because it helps create a shared understanding between all stakeholders of all the steps needed for someone to perform a particular activity, as well as a means of prioritizing the steps and their options. In just a few short hours we had the entire process mapped out and prioritized, and ready to review. Once the initial story map was done, we walked the executive team through it, and they were able to propose a few unarticulated details.
After the initial creation of the story map, we digitized it and kept it up-to-date throughout the project. As new questions arose, we captured and addressed them on the story map, and it became one of the resources for SASR’s dev team.
Low-fidelity interactive prototype
Based on the user story map we had created with the SASR team, we were able to create a rough interactive prototype covering the end-to-end experience within just a few days so we could get quick initial feedback from SASR.
By having a working prototype in hand—literally—the team at SASR was able to get a real sense of how the app would work. Many ideas were validated, and we learned about some that needed a different approach and made quick adjustments to try out different solutions.
We even learned about a few new requirements, which were easily incorporated into the prototype. By the end of the first week, we had a flow and feature set that all stakeholders understood and agreed upon.
High-fidelity design details & specifications
During the second week, we focused on polishing the visual design of the solution and addressed all known edge cases (like handling workers that don’t return from breaks).
Our goal was to get the design to a point where the development team had all the information they needed to build the app as efficiently as possible. In addition to an interactive prototype, we provided detailed user flows, business logic, and visual design specifications.
The Results
In less than two weeks we helped SASR go from problem to a developable specification that had been tested and revised.
Rather than needing to do an expensive and lengthy rebuild of their existing applications and processes, our design approach allowed SASR to create a separate application on top of their existing platform that is now being tested in the field through pilot programs.
