Loc8um's founders identified a space in the recruitment market to connect locums with practices in a more open and flexible way. Working with the founders I helped to bring this idea to life across the Loc8um brand and app user experience and user interface.
The current market place is dominated by recruitment agencies who typically have high fee's and small rosters of locums which are hard to access. Their vision was to create an open market place which gave locums the freedom and opportunity to find work on their terms while helping to maximise recruitment efficiency and reduce staffing costs.
I worked directly with the Loc8um team to define the brand strategy through a series of workshops to understand the market, audience and requirements for the brand identity. During this process I developed the brand strategy, tone of voice and positioning to allow loc8um to communicate their values and ethos effectively.
This strategy and positioning stage was used a platform to develop a complete visual identity system that worked across all areas of their new brand ready to take to market.
Alongside the brand identity design I worked with the founders to understand and develop the user experience and app interface of the new app.
Based on their initial vision for how the service would be used, I worked with them to rationalise the process, ensuring the user experience was intuitive and easy to understand for the end user.
The result was a user experience that allowed veterinary practices to connect with locums to fill vacancies in a cost effective, timely and easy to use process.
The key challenge for the brand strategy was to effectively communicate with two different audiences.
The brand needed to appeal to both tech savvy locums who work for themselves and enjoy the freedom that brings and the people within a veterinary practice who are in charge of hiring and staffing.
The discovery stage of the project resulted in a clear direction to focus communications on the benefits the app would create. This allowed any communications to talk directly to each audience while keeping any conversation focused on the service.
The strategy and identity plays heavily on the connection it creates between the two audiences and inspired the icon and logo type. The visual identity needed to have a professional quality to reflect the corporate aspects of the hiring staff and highly qualified locums while also conveying the positive benefits of the app.
The key challenge in developing the Loc8um user experience was balancing the requirements of the two different audiences to create a frictionless search and booking process.
Based on research across the veterinary industry as well as early user research a number of pain points (such as late payments and lack of control of the recruiting process) were identified.
These findings were further supported by locum questionnaires to identify what was important to them in managing their career.
This research and early prototyping resulted in a fully developed user story that brought the two audiences together in a way that was mutually beneficial.
Through a number of iterative sprints the user story was developed into a set of features that would make up the first release of the app.
The on-boarding process allows locums to set up their account preferences to quickly start searching for placements.
Taking the minimum required details to provide placements that were financially competitive as well as accessible, then educating on app features creates a short learning curve for new users. This was crucial to getting locums seeing the benefits of the service quickly.
Once users are successfully on-boarded they are provided with multiple ways to learn more about the app through hints, tips and tutorials. These would guide the user to get the most out of the service and ultimately provide a better user experience.
Through the user experience workshops and development process it was decided to create a central feed to allow locums to manage their work day. This aggregated the latest activity from a range of app features including a calendar , placement details, recommendations for work and an analytics section to show earnings and tax.
The dashboard allows locums to effectively manage their schedule to see up coming placements, days off and more.
Notifications on activity such as outstanding offers reviews and messages are also easily accessed from the main navigation. Combined with time sensitive activity, such as the locums next placement mean the dashboard provides a very quick and easily digestible overview of the locums work life.
The apps primary task is to connect locums with practices in a cost effective way. To achieve this a desktop componentsfor the service was designed. This allowed practices to create and manage their placements.
This allowed practices to create defined blocks of time on which locums can make offers. Locums were given the functionality to make an offer on the whole period of time or specific sections of the placement. Practices then have the option to select the most appropriate offers for their situation.
This gave the system enough flexibility to allow practices to adequately cover vacant practice time against the locums desire to have more control over when and wherer they work.
The app effectively becomes a virtual assistant for both user groups as it provides management of the placement itself. locums are able to check in and out based on their location and provide proof of attendance, while practices are kept updated of their current staffing situation.
Both user groups can review a placement to create a community review system to ensure high standards of accountability. The app manages transactions and provides users with downloadable invoices to help integrate with other business software.
