B2B2C mobile appS
How do you redesign 100+ staffing apps for 600K+ workers? |
Streamlining job search and hiring for over 600,000 candidates across 100+ staffing agencies.
Disclaimers: The client and all product names have been anonymized under the name "BusyBee" to protect their privacy - any similarities to existing brands and products with the same name are purely coincidental. All design work below is my own interpretation recreation of the original source material.
Background
BusyBee, a leading staffing software provider, needed to modernize its mobile experience to better serve staffing agencies and their talent workers. BusyBee offered "JobHive" as a mobile experience to complement "Apiary" their recruiter ATS/CRM. Over the course of 8 years between 2016 and 2024, over 100 staffing agencies purchased their own personalized version of JobHive - the same product wrapped in their branding with select feature access depending on the package they purchased.
While new features were added to enhance the app over the years, JobHive unfortunately had poor product adoption due to numerous user reported issues including an outdated UI and poor navigation experience. Moreover, both creating new apps and updating existing ones relied on processes that took up to six months per update across all client builds.
My Role
As the Product Experience Lead (Business Analyst), I spearheaded a complete redesign that balanced user needs, technical constraints, and business goals to deliver a more intuitive, scalable app experience for thousands of workers and recruiters.
Product Ecosystem
To contextualize the complexity of this redesign project, it is helpful to have an overview of the different interconnected software solutions BusyBee offers to supercharge the staffing industry.
Staffing agencies that offer payroll processing as a service can also purchase the HoneyPay Card product:
Payroll personnel can use the platform to pay talent faster compared to traditional biweekly ACH (especially impactful for gig workers).
Eligible talent can sign up for a physical HoneyPay debit card and add a digital counterpart to their device’s mobile wallet.
HoneyPay debit cards can be used at a large network of ATMs nationwide without fees.
The Problem
BusyBee Apiary, the desktop recruiter CRM, had seen consistent evolution as a priority offering by the organization, but the add-on mobile experience BusyBee JobHive for talent to apply to jobs lagged behind, creating a gap in the experience across the ecosystem.
Talent workers found it hard to navigate the app, and recruiters reported lower-than-desired adoption.
While it was not directly reported by clients, my team and I discovered poor accessibility (insufficient contrast ratios, inconsistent text sizing, etc.) resulting from passive design decisions made prior to the establishment of the in-house UX team.
As we onboarded new clients, this friction became more apparent. The redesign became a higher priority as the team was responsible for managing a platform that grew to over 100 apps across iOS and Android.
Team & Timeline
Product Experience Lead / Business Analyst (me): Defined strategy, led research, spearheaded design decisions, and coordinated cross-functional collaboration.
1 Junior Product Designer: Provided iterative design support for new UI.
6 Mobile Developers: Built modular, configurable components across iOS and Android.
2 Backend Developers: Maintained service layer integration and data flows.
2 Configuration Specialists: Ensured correct set up and branding for each client’s apps.
2 QA Engineers: Led rigorous manual and automated testing.
The project spanned 6 months, running in parallel with other product roadmap items. This timeline enabled us to test, launch, and iterate confidently leading up to launch while simultaneously managing other priorities on the product roadmap and engineering team backlogs.
Tools
Azure DevOps, Microsoft Teams, Figma, LucidChart, Atlassian Confluence
My team and I successfully executed the redesign project to deliver a beautiful new interface for the home screen of the app and optimized information architecture for smoother navigation across all 100+ client versions of the application. Below are before and after images of the UI design.
Streamlined User Flows
We transformed the app's information architecture to better accommodate user access to key features of the app such as JobHive to search for and apply for opportunities. We moved home screen menu items that were less contextually relevant to talent on a daily basis such as "Share the App" to a dedicated side menu. Similarly, the Notifications button was transformed into a bell icon which has become a common design pattern across modern software.
Updated User Permission Prompt Surfacing
When opening the app for the first time, users would be presented with every single user permission prompt required for all features to work seamlessly. Unfortunately this experience led to a lot of friction for first time users as they would not be given sufficient context into how and why the app needed access to native device functionality such as access to Notifications, Calendar, Location Services, Files, Camera, and Photo Library. The new app design behavior triggered these device permission prompts at more relevant times such as only requesting Notification and Calendar access when a worker has been assigned a job, and Camera/Photo Library/Files access when they need to upload a profile photo or employment form.
Clearer Notifications
Improving the language and context of notifications resulted in more meaningful talent user engagement.
Optimized Brand Integration
Making a base app capable of being customizable while remaining accessible required more strictly defined parameters for the degree of customization will still creating a personalized experience for staffing agencies and their talent workers.
By adjusting the customization parameters we were able to create a more meaningful and accessible user experience that was scalable to all sorts of staffing agencies, even those with specialized services.
Learn about the step-by-step approach taken during the project, including research, planning, design, development, testing, and optimization phases.
Research & Planning
In addition to the feedback we received from clients, I conducted a full audit of the BusyBee JobHive app, capturing every possible navigation path with screenshots.
We identified several key areas for improvement to the information architecture and possible ways to optimize the home screen design, in addition to more appropriate triggers for User Permission Prompts (access to device calendar, notifications, and more).
The below screenshot illustrates what the auditing process looked like, intentionally blurred for privacy.
UI Audit
Studying these screens across various branded apps gave us more insights on how to create design choices that better accommodated unique logos, colors, and other assets without compromising on critical accessibility parameters such as text legibility.
While the below screens are white-labeled to protect the identities of the clients, they are not exaggerations of the severity of the UI issues that manifested in the previous version of the BusyBee app platform.
Team Coordination
The diagram below illustrates the process for new app creation requests and the different teams involved. In addition to supporting at least a few of these app requests a month, like any tech company we also had to manage a growing backlog of bugs and other priority items raised by various teams ranging from customer support to client success, and even the C-suite.
Design & Iteration
Our team's designer created beautiful and intuitive user interfaces to serve as the basis for the apps new visual identity. The developers and I had a deeper understanding of how the existing version of the app worked and was being used, so we iteratively refined designs based on what was most feasible in terms of ensuring both existing and new users could navigate the app without encountering any unfamiliar steps in their respective user flows.
Development & Implementation
Leveraged agile development methodologies to build the scheduling app from the ground up. Prioritized feature development based on user feedback and technical feasibility. Implemented AI algorithms to analyze user behavior and optimize scheduling recommendations.
Testing & Optimization
Conducted rigorous testing across various devices and platforms to ensure compatibility and performance. Gathered user feedback through beta testing and iteratively optimized the app based on usability metrics and user satisfaction.
As with many large-scale redesign efforts, our team encountered a range of challenges. The BusyBee team had ambitious goals for transforming the product experience, however the full scope of effort required to execute these changes became clearer only once we began unpacking the work.
This gap between vision and implementation surfaced several roadblocks, but it also gave us an opportunity to advocate for more intentional design processes and scalable solutions.
What follows is an honest look at the hurdles we faced, and how we worked through them as a cross-functional team: identifying necessary efforts that were worth the results versus those that were not.
Limited User Research
I would describe the JobHive app platform as a B2B2C product - designed as a solution sold to businesses (staffing agencies) to serve their consumers/end users (workers in their talent pool).
While BusyBee had collected feedback from B2B clients, we didn't have direct access to their talent (end users of the JobHive app) to conduct hands-on usability testing or interviews which would have equipped our teams with powerful insights more directly rooted in the actual users' experiences.
We learned a lot about what was desired from the clients' perspective in the form of messages covering reported bugs and desired enhancement requests to our customer support team, and it ultimately fed into the product decisions in the roadmap that would then synthesize into what were established as key deliverables for the redesign.
Impact on Existing Users
If you suddenly came home to your home after a long work day and found all your furniture moved around, you would naturally take at least a moment to process what you are looking at and attempt to make sense of the situation.
Similarly, we had to think about the butterfly effect of one small design change with 600,000 active users across iOS and Android platforms - and consequently, the staffing agencies that would be fielding questions from their workers.
If we changed the name of a button or where it was located, it could have an impact on how that person checks in for their shift and consequently how they are paid for their time. This point emphasizes the importance of access to users in user research.
Prioritizing Scalable & Accessible Design Decisions
With over 100 customer-branded versions of JobHive in circulation, each with varying feature configurations and visual themes, our design decisions had to balance flexibility with consistency. We established a scalable design system that prioritized accessible color contrast, text legibility, and touch-friendly components across all variants.
Rather than designing one-off solutions, we focused on modular components and clear UI patterns that could adapt to different branding needs without sacrificing usability. This approach ensured that all talent users—regardless of the app’s visual skin or added features—could navigate the experience confidently and intuitively.
Our Rockstar QA Team
Our QA engineers were essential to the overall success of this project. Their knowledge of the app and overall BusyBee product suite was paramount in helping newer team members quickly understand and identify the impact of certain changes on the app. In their testing of different user stories as part of the redesign project, they identified multiple bugs and required updates as part of the code refactoring efforts.
Android vs. iOS
Changing the user permission prompts surfacing behavior was a key deliverable to ensure a smoother onboarding, but executing something like this had different implications in terms of feasibility for Android and iOS.
On iOS, this was considered a light lift that any of our developers could get done.
On Android, we had to build out new logic for surfacing the prompts an effort that was anywhere from 3-5 times the story points compared to iOS.
Making the Difficult Choices
The initial plan for the mobile app was to redesign the whole app to make it look and feel more modern - a direction which was naturally desirable across all fronts for end-users, clients, and the business - but unrealistic without confidently assessing what was necessary and possible with the different resources available, especially time and developer prioritization.
Arriving at a Realistic Scope
While we initially wanted to deliver a full redesign, it was clear that it would trigger a chain reaction that would be disruptive across all fronts: externally all talent and recruiters would need time and guidance to learn how to navigate the application, and the same would apply internally across all teams. In the grand scheme of things, gradually iterating and rolling out improvements to core parts of the app was the right move given other roadmap priorities.
Communicating Changes
As the scope of the project evolved, it was essential to communicate the project plan and outcomes internally across the organization so everyone understood the impact to their work:
Anyone client facing whether they were leadership or customer support needed to know enough about the work being done be able to confidently speak towards improvements we planned on delivering (and when they could be expected).
Other internal product and development teams working on other BusyBee products would need to understand the impact of certain changes to the app on their products, such as notifications triggered by the Apiary ATS and the HoneyPay platform.
Our training and marketing teams also needed to update their materials referencing the app: anyone learning about the app after the redesign would likely feel confused referencing outdated materials with the old design.
The success metrics below reflect that the redesigned app was more than just a refresh of the visual design elements on the surface. The efforts my team and I made to improve the app at its core led to meaningful improvements in worker engagement, agency satisfaction, and our organization's efficiency.
63% Increase in Job Placement Efficiency
Workers were able to find and accept jobs faster resulting from a more streamlined user flow to access job listings faster and more seamlessly - directly improving staffing fill rates.
Average App Store Ratings increased from 3.2★ to 4.5★
By improving usability and onboarding flows, we saw a significant increase in user satisfaction across iOS and Android stores.
12x Team Efficiency
An average of 6 months effort from our app dev team per app was now possible in just 2 weeks - a massive win for our internal teams and clients alike.