When I first started at Snagajob, I met the CEO who shared his vision with me on the future of Snagajob that would take the company flagship product from a typical job search app to a service prepared for the gig economy. As I met and talked to more people, I realized that there were many ideas around the company but no convergence on what the future of Snagajob looked like.
In order to build some consensus around where Snagajob is going, I set up a design workshop. This workshop would not only lead to convergence on our direction, but also get the company to start thinking differently with a focus on problem solving vs. constantly pushing out unvalidated features.
To prepare for this workshop, I researched the job seeking experience using surveys and one on one interviews with seekers across the country. After analysis and synthesis, I created some proto-personas and journey maps that would provide a foundation for the workshop.
You can read more about the research in the Snagajob App piece.
My approach to design is heavily influenced by the Design Thinking method from Stanford’s d.School and IDEO’s Human Centered Design process. I specifically love IDEO’s free toolkit as it helps designers focus on solving problems and provides a good framework for how to approach them.
I used some of IDEO’s worksheets around “Framing the Problem”, revealing “Insights”, and “How Might We Statements” to facilitate the immersive part of the workshop and help participants visually understand what was being asked of them.
I set up 5 teams and gave each team a persona along with a journey map as a starting point. I also created a presentation to show where we are and where we intend to go. After a break, we jumped right in and I facilitated the immersive part of the workshop. I gave an introduction to each session that were based on the HCD toolkit to build that connection with the materials the participants would be using.
As the teams moved from understanding the problem to ideation, I added in challenges which included giving them new personas and journey maps to consider midway through their ideation sessions, and introducing extreme users when they started creating designs and prototypes.
The workshop was a great success. We had representation across all departments including Product, Engineering, Design, Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, and the Executive team (even our CEO participated).
We were able to gain a shared understanding of the problems our job seekers face and move towards convergence on how we can solve these problems. After the teams presented their designs, we voted on a best design and best feature using stickers.
This workshop set the stage for how we approached the gig economy experience which would eventually become Snag Work. I'm excited to see how the company continues to reinvent the hourly working experience!
