Redesigning a hiring platform for remote engineers.
G2i has been one of the early pioneers of remote work. Not only does the company not have an office location, but it’s entire mission is too enable talented engineers to find quality work regardless of their location. After years of running a bootstrapped operation, the company trusted me with designing their new brand identity and a self-service hiring platform.
User Research
Although I do understand why spending time on an exploratative user reseach is not always possible, it’s a really important win for the design process if I manage to carve out some budget and time for it. Convincing stakeholders to do that, can be especially difficult in teams with low design maturity. But G2i was willing to give it a try, and I spent the next 2 weeks conducting over 20 interviews with the company’s users via Zoom (developers and corporate clients), leadership and customer service agents. It was quite difficult to manage this process remotely and alone, but at the end I was ready to present to the team a number of crucial artefacts that we would continue to use at various stages in the design process later on - the user journey map, the key personas and a number of insights about why our developers and corporate clients chose us (later on these insights would help to create our initial copy for the landing page).
Branding Explorations
Before we could start working on the designs for the new platform, we needed to do some branding work. To kick it off, we first looked at how the current brand assets represented the company’s values (the ideology of the company and the why were very important for everyone working there). We quickly found out that - starting with the logo - the brand assets were not communicating brand values and personality very well. Once everyone in the leardership team understood that, the team was ready to start working on the new brand assets.
One clear insight of the brand review was that one of the main problems with our current brand was the color. It did not represent the younger, fresher, more digitally-native personality that we were going for. Not wanting to deviate from the existing color palette too much, I came up with a new, revised color palette consisting mainly of fresher hues of the primary colors, together with white, black and several shades of grey (a very helpful color for designing complex interfaces such as dashboards).
On top of that, I also drew inspiration from the various shapes that one could see in architecture (see Vitra building) and digital product wireframes (kind of the final destilation of G2i’s value proposition to it’s customers). Experimenting with different shapes and colors, as well as their combinations could be compared to saying the first words of our new design language.
Eventually I tested these design concepts on the first landing page wireframes. The proposed concept of a modular design language got a really good reception with the company’s leadership, as well as the developers and the corporate clients that we involved in the process.
Designing the Core User Journeys
Over the following months, together with various stakeholders, we designed the core user journeys for corporate clients, developers and the internal users. This was a true test of our design direction, forcing us to make many adaptations to it. In parallel, the initial design systems was starting to be born out of the necessity for standardization (scaling) and having to hand over the designs to the development team.
A Road to Design System
After a few weeks of design and development running in parallel, there was a lot of pressure to focus on ensuriing that there were not only good design deliverables, but also that the design process was well understood and communicated to all the key stakeholders. A crucial part of this communication was the design system that I have set up and managed together with the development team.
It contained the particles, atoms and molecules of our design. Color-contrast tested color pallette, typography and spacings together combined into headers and menu components, which then combined into interaction flows, enabling us to design, implement and test new functionality at an ever-faster pace.
Code Experiments
Carolyne Wade / Brutalist / Canvas Magazine / Words of Women / Brux / Jiffy / Super Shapes
McKinsey & Company
Developing a lifestyle adjustment program for new diabetes type II patients.
McKinsey & Company
Creating a vision for citizen experience of the future for a government in the Middle East.
McKinsey & Company
Reimagining core customer journeys for a large Russian bank.
McKinsey & Company
Designing a content-driven eCommerce experience to help women find their perfectly-fitting bra online.
Layar
Designing world’s first wave of Augmented Reality (AR) experiences.
L’Oreàl Brandstorm
Developing a new packaging strategy for Redken for Men
Personal project
UXKit - world’s most comprehensive kit of UX methods.
Personal project
Storyboarding library
for Sketch.
Personal project
Inspiring millennials to reconnect with nature.
Personal project
Building GoPro for music
Photo stories:
Nazare
The Race of Gentlemen
Environment
U-Hauling Ass
California
Various:
Soundcloud
Resume (CV)
Copyright 2021 Martin Ahe