Figma, Jira, & Qualtrics

Tools

UX Designer

ROLE

Mobile, UX

TYPE

2 UX Designers, 1 Product Manager, 1 Product Owner, 3 Developers, & Graphic Designer

TEAM

StoreForce is a B2B SaaS company that specializes in workforce management for specialty retail.

The Employee Self-Service (ESS) application is used by over 230,000 retail employees to manage their schedule, communicate with team members, and complete tasks.

After the success of the ESS Redesign, I was offered an extension to continue working on the ESS application as a UX Designer to improve some user flows. I worked with the product and development team to propose the implementation of a new onboarding flow.

Summary

Problem

Users reported difficulties with account initialization and password resetting on the ESS application. Consequently, employees had trouble accessing and editing their schedules via mobile phones when they were away from their retail stores.

How might we make access to the ESS app convenient but also secure?

solution

Allow remote, self-initialization. We developed a secure method for onboarding new users to the app and enabled existing users to reset their passwords via multi-factor authentication (MFA).

5 out of 8

participants struggled to locate QR codes required to initialize a new employee onto the ESS application.

Usability Test

4 out of 5

participants voiced how inefficient it was to initialize their profile on the ESS application.

interview

7 out of 8

participants did not feel comfortable with their password being accessible by their managers.

questionnaire

4 out of 4

Service Specialists voiced how clients had difficulty onboarding employees onto the ESS application and lack of security measures.

CO-DESIGN

Why was it difficult?

Let's dive deeper into these stats!

01 inconvenient

Employees could only initialize their accounts by scanning a QR code in-store. This meant they couldn't check or edit their schedules for days unless they visited the store on their day off.

02 not secure

Employees could only set/reset their passwords in the StoreForce desktop application that was usually on the store's desktop, which was accessible to many people. Managers could view and edit these passwords.

Considerations when designing

Enterprise system

The retail industry operates on multiple layers. The initialization process relies on large amounts of data. Employees need to be initialized within a specific physical store’s ESS environment.

Security

During my time in venture capital, I learned the value of establishing trust with users. People are more likely to use a product that's secure! Therefore, users must verify their identity when initializing their account, and no one else should be able to access it.

Who are we designing for

journey map for sales associate persona to initialize ESS

Design

Proposed solution

MFA is a popular method for verifying user identity during login.
‍
Instead of relying on managers to access their ESS accounts, users can log in with the email provided during onboarding. They can also reset their passwords through the ESS application using their email.

After consulting with various teams about technical constraints, a service blueprint was created to illustrate how the proposed solution would work.

Manager POV

ESS is a legacy system and users are accustomed to processes, so we kept some existing concepts and added the following changes:

Retail employee POV

Altogether, there were 3 iterations of the ESS onboarding screen for employees along with the feedback I received from design reviews.

Iteration 1 - initial concept

Iteration 2 - language & illustrations

2nd iteration of design with added icons

Final iteration

Initialized user forgets password

Results

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to see this project ship due to my contract ending but these are the anticipated results:

Easy onboarding

Store managers can onboard users into the app with the click of a button that sends an activation link to a user's email.

Secure onboarding

Passwords are no longer accessible by management or administrators, so users have full control and ownership of their passwords.

Less help-desk tickets

By giving more autonomy to users, customer service representatives experience less issues when it comes to employees needing access to their accounts because they have access to their accounts anywhere at anytime.

Learnings & what I would do differently

Conversations with stakeholders

I found it really valuable talking to stakeholders and decision makers that would impact the final deliverable early on in the process to ensure alignment across all teams and to understand expectations.

Updated login procedures

The cybersecurity space is constantly evolving. Something I would consider for the future are passkeys or passwordless logins like Trusona.

Accessible & secure onboarding