Rapid Prototyping

USER EXPERIENCE · PRODUCT DESIGN

Sidekicker is a casual and temporary staffing marketplace platform. Businesses would post jobs and pre-screened, skilled workers would apply, be selected, be paid, and rated via the platform.

This is a case study about using low-fidelity prototyping to validate solutions early on with stakeholders, allowing the team to quickly and easily start or move on to the most impactful pieces of work.

The Problem

'Utilisation' - we needed to help customers book the same worker a) more often and b) repeatedly. The aim was to reduce the cost of training new staff and also to help high-performing workers get more shifts.

The Approach

A big part of this case study is the fact that we started this project somewhat already with a solution in mind (huge red flag, I know 🚩). We thought that the answer would be to build a scheduling solution.

To kick things off we looked at competitors and existing products, we asked ourselves:

• What were employers currently using to roster staff?
• What did rostering platforms out there have that we didn't?
• What manual processes did we have internally that could be replicated in software?

We used Lo-Fi prototyping software Balsamiq to create options to figure out what we wanted.

Outcome

Our stakeholders found that many of these solutions would be too much development work and not deliver enough value.

Revisiting the problem at hand, we were looking for a solution that would balance the scale of effort vs benefit. That's when we thought that perhaps delivering a high-level view of staff bookings to employers would get us part way to our goal. That's when the idea came up to update our existing calendar.

Learnings

I sometimes call this project "How we ended up building a calendar". What happened next was a realisation that all of these solutions required too much effort - for not a lot of guaranteed value. On the other hand our product already had a calendar that we could freshen up, add some functionality and quickly deliver some usefulness to customers. And that's exactly what we did.