Case Study 2
Building a White Label HR Platform Experience
CLIENT: Mineral (formerly ThinkHR & Mammoth HR) | ROLE: Creative Director & Senior UX/UI Product Designer | AGENCY: Emerge Interactive
Challenge:
Just before the pandemic shut down offices everywhere, Emerge Interactive started a client relationship with ThinkHR – a provider of HR knowledge and people risk management solutions through their proprietary cloud-based platform. Two major challenges presented themselves right away.
First, ThinkHR had recently acquired another company, Mammoth HR, which offered its own online portal and certified HR consultants to their affiliate base and clients for carrying out online human resource services. ThinkHR was an engineering led company that admitted they struggled with the design process in the past and preferred to engineer solutions directly without involving design as part of the solution. As part of the acquisition deal, Mammoth mandated utilizing a 3rd party in the form of a digital product design agency to help strategize and design a unified platform, facilitate its construction, and establish a proper design process and protocol for the new company. Thus, Emerge was hired.
Second, these two companies were merging into an entirely new and undefined company and brand, so a separate branding agency was hired and brought in to manage its inception and evolution. This in itself introduced many distinct challenges as the digital platform design Emerge was creating evolved.
goal:
The strategy and goal for the product platform Emerge was to design and help build was likewise two-fold. First, Emerge needed to create a unified HR platform experience that would leverage prioritized functionality from both ThinkHR’s and Mammoth HR’s existing platforms. Prioritizing features such as prospective and existing client management via Salesforce and other must haves would streamline the volume of functionality the new platform would require and keep it relevant to their respective audience’s most pressing needs. This prioritization would surface from interviews of users of both platforms which the creative team at Emerge would conduct and lead.
As ThinkHR was new to working with a digital agency partner, during the project kick-off an empathy mapping session was conducted to get everyone in the mindset of understanding audiences in an empathetic fashion and thinking about these audience’s respective tasks, influences, feelings, pain points, and ultimate goal. This helped ThinkHR both welcome and realize the benefit of the design process as a whole.
The secondary strategy and goal was to build a unified platform up-front as a generic and unbranded experience not only because their new unified brand was under development, but also to facilitate the creation of a “white label” experience for one of their biggest audiences, Human Resource company customers, who would personalize the experience for their own company use. These audiences would be customizing their platform experience to use their own company color palette and logo. Finally, we had to plan for an overarching default brand aesthetic that the branding agency was working on separately.
PROCESS:
After partnering with Emerge, the agency product team was assembled consisting of myself as acting Creative Director and Senior UX/UI Product Designer, a dedicated UX Designer, a dedicated UI Designer, a Project Manager, and Solutions Architect Lead.
Our first objective was to interview users of both platforms, primarily HR staff, to get an understanding of their thoughts on their respective platforms and the functionalities they utilized the most. We also wanted to understand what their pain points and frustrations were in regards to functionality or content, and what they would want to see in a unified product experience.
““I don’t have the ability to change the layout of the page or move things around and sort things in an order that I care about. It would be great if I had a landing page where I had the ability to customize what information I see first.””
As we gained more detail about what users of both platforms were saying, a clearer picture of prioritized functionality surfaced. After presenting this to the client as part of an insights and strategy presentation, final decisions were made on what would be prioritized, and subsequently a proposed user flow and information architecture that addressed these prioritized functions and interactions was put together by myself and my team. This led to the creation of wireframes to further visualize the nature of specific functionality and user interaction and eventually unbranded UI design comps that would be user tested to gain further insight into the overall usability of the platform and address any challenges or issues with the overall design or intended functionality and interactions.
Influenced by our work with Splunk, Emerge’s agile working model for this project included weekly internal scrum meetings to report progress and address blockers or issues. ThinkHR as an engineering-led company was already using Jira so we utilized this for both design and development. UI comps were created and a design system established.
Eventually, the finalized brand name and design aesthetic of ‘Mineral’ was unveiled by the branding agency partner. Design elements from this newly created brand were applied to the unbranded and generic HR platform design Emerge had created to generate a new ‘default design’ for the white label experience. This created some unforeseen team friction when designers from the branding agency began to weigh in on the platform and make requests that would compromise the accessibility of the site such as font legibility and color contrast. As the product platform creative team lead, it was my responsibility to both educate our brand agency partner and work with other product team designers to negotiate asks and work towards a fair and accessible compromise whenever possible.
The Emerge team used Miro for visualizing the user journey, information architecture, and low and high fidelity wireframes, Sketch for UI comps and product page designs, Marvel for UI prototypes, and Zeplin.io for creating developer friendly design annotations and hand-off links. Over time, the product design was migrated to Figma.
OUTCOMES:
Despite the many inherent challenges, overall this project was a success. Launching a digital product platform as a brand is being created and evolving, with two companies merging their different operating models, unique cast of personalities, and ownership structure is no easy feat. Since the launch of the platform in 2021, 69% of Mineral’s clients say that they’ve benefited from the platform’s fast response times and expert guidance. These customers also reported an increased confidence in the level of compliance achieved, saved time and effort in their day-to-day HR and compliance administration, and avoided having to hire additional HR and compliance personnel.
Emerge was able to successfully navigate a tricky client relationship with many challenges to provide a unified branded platform that was ultimately lauded as a success and further solidified Emerge’s reputation in building innovative digital product experiences for its clients. I personally and professionally grew from this experience as well, learning further how to negotiate unique design challenges with a product team to provide the best user experience possible.