2022-2024
Cross Country Healthcare
Product Design, UX/UI, UX Research, UX Copy Writing, Marketing and Graphic Design
Sr. Product Designer
Xperience is a leading travel nurse job board. We specialize in travel nursing and provide a wealth of resources, opportunities, and professional insight in order to help nurses make informed career decisions, with trust and experience helping guide the way. The platform features advanced job search features, a custom profile builder, payroll tracking, and an accompanying mobile app that helps nurses access jobs and their career information from anywhere.
Nurses need access to opportunities, recruiters, and a wealth of contextual information that they can trust.
Xperience provides digital product solutions to the many problems travel nurses face, all with the experience of decades in healthcare staffing and recruiting to back it up.
Product Design, UX/UI Design, Web Design, Email Design, User Research/Testing, Marketing and Graphic Design
An advanced and intuitive search, data visualization tools to engance payroll and hour tracking, and location specific information were some of the biggest requests we received.
One of the great challenges across the Xperience platform was navigating the technical limitations and incremental enhancements we would push as a product team - navigating from the product we had - to the product we wanted to be.
Cross Country went through a transformation from a legacy recruiting and staffing agency, to a company determined to deliver modern digital products to its client and HCP users.
Our challenge was to begin the clean up of tech debt the company incurred in that pivot.
The app store plays a crucial role in our customer journey. It's where users go from being made aware of our products, to taking action. For that reason we highlighted our differentiated features, kept design simple and on brand, and used clear, descriptive, and punchy value props.
Just prior to my employment at CCH, the Xperience Mobile App was released. Its MVP featured a robust feature set enabling travel nurses and healthcare practitioners to more easily access job opportunities and track applications, compliance, and more.
I was one of two designers to work on this product and I was tasked as the lead and sole designer to scope, plan, and craft and document a number or large feature redesigns/upgrades including: Search, Payroll, Timesheets, Benefits and Info, Onboarding and EEO feedback, and an array of interactive supplemental location information tools.
I was tasked with designing content across a number of marketing channels including app stores, landing pages, emails, client demo prototypes, and presentations, within the context of the Cross Country brand and design language.
Being able to approach and coordinate with a marketing team from the expertise of a product designer and with the benefit of having, interview and engaged our users, meant that by collaborating together we had a clear pathway to improving our sales and engagement funnels.
From client demos and prototypes to graphic design intended for client presentations and our marketing channels.
Part of my work included creating graphics to represent our product ecosystem. By using the Cross County Logo cleverly we invite the viewer to glimpse into the Cross Country world and all we have to offer. The material below was used in stakeholder and sales presentations.
Additionally our gained understanding through user interviews allowed us to craft a strong branded visual language and tone that resonated strongly with our end users.
We strove to improve our funnel via consistent A/B testing comparing approaches, copy, and imagery. The goal of the page below was to work the customer down the sales funnel - capture attention, showoff the product with great design, imagery, and value props, and make it frictionless to quickly download the app with the use of QR codes placed clearly in the hero.
The app store plays a crucial role in our customer journey. It's where users go from being made aware of our products, to taking action. For that reason we highlighted our differentiated features, kept design simple and on brand, and used clear, descriptive, and punchy value props. I A/B extensively within our teams to capture tone, and highlight our product within brand guidelines.
As legacy organizations aim to remain competitive, product teams are tasked with the challenge of designing within organizational goals, roadmaps, and priorities. One of the great challenges was navigating our own limitations, branding, and goals, to deliver exceptional products and design.
To provide Cross Country Xperience users with more contextual information, we implemented a number of widgets and value adding features to each job listing.
I opted for a familiar and visual approach to these widgets, taking references from Apples weather widget, AirBnB, and other familiar tools.
Users were navigating away from listings pages to find more location specific information.
Users relied heavily on forums and word of mouth to get vital information about facilities and units.
Short term housing is one of the greatest insecurities travel nurses expressed impacting their job acceptance decisions in user interviews.
Implementing custom designs and utilized Walkscore's valuable API to help users understand the transportation accessibility in a given city.
Additional weather widgets were designed and implemented to indicate month to month trends for each location.
Designs explored an exciting short-term housing feature that implemented the Furnished Finder API and provided nurses with recommended housing options.
Through conducting user research our users communicated the walkability, safety, and general transportation options of a location as one of the driving factors in their job search. Additionally the communicated the environment and weather as major considerations.
Our goal is to drive job applications and keep users on the listing page. I made the decision to keep the walk score widget accessible and interactive from this screen rather than a modal that would navigate a user further from our CTA's, and further from taking action.
Each button (walk, bicycle, rail) was designed to remain accessible. They were placed on the right side to accommodate the majority or right handed users, and by tapping on a mode of transportation, the left side populates with contextual information for that location.
I opted for a simple design that communicated as much information as possible at a glance. The transportation modes are easily digestible and the extent of transportation ease is quickly understandable with the use of a progress ring and familiar color scale.
My user research validated the decision making process for our users. At least 80% of our nurse practitioners enjoy the outdoors, and experiential aspects of travel nursing (Hiking, sight seeing, etc).
Since the climate and weather of a location was so valuable to the job selection process, I crafted an intuitive and familiar interactive weather widget that allowed job seekers to see a projection based on historical trends. We opted for simplifying down to temperature and precipitation to keep the widget glanceable and useful without overdoing it.
To further increase the usefulness of the widget we used our own data on time from application to placement, and defaulted the projection position to show the weather data for a given location at the average start of placement (roughly 1.5 months). The user was still able to click and drag month to month to view any data for any given month.
I was tasked with the major redesign of the Xperience platform search features. New search functionalty and flows were needed for Web, Web Mobile, and the Xperience Mobile App
Users were losing track of their search due to a poor hierarchy established in the mobile app.
Users were unable to make advanced searches that competing products were catering to such as compact state searches.
Having two fields presented as equally essential to search was confusing users.
Implementing a smarter mobile app search where users could easily search by multiple specialties and locations
Improving the search UX by creating a dedicated search screen where users could access a primary and secondary search tray.
Reorganizing the web and mobile web search design so that users of smaller screen devices no longer experienced friction and difficulty understanding their search.
The Xperience search presented a number of challenges, most of which was making sure users knew there was a search. Secondly, making sure it was easily accessible, and that they could utilize an advanced search designed to cater to the needs of travel nurses while still be a familiar and intuitive feature.
Due to how our previous search was built, it would’ve been a significantly greater development lift to have either the location or specialty field behave as a filter.
With our development considerations in mind, the cleanest solution was a two field search screen that allowed users to make their primary search queries as seamlessly as possible, while being able to toggle between either the location or specialty input field without leaving their position entirely. Analogs were explored in the research and planning phase and influences were drawn from popular searches like Amazon and Meetup.
Search across Xperience was down, users weren't using search and through user interviews, we found that they weren't seeing the search at all and when they were, it wasnt very useful. The user experience was also hindered by there being two search fields, causing confusion and friction. Each time the user wanted to narrow their search, they were required to exit one field and jump to the other.
Users needed to be able to search in the quickest and most comprehensive manner to maximize their time spent on Xperience. Previously the user had no way of searching easily by compact license states (states where one nursing license was also accepted).
Secondarily, users needed to be able to search by speciality. Additionally they needed to be able to search by any combination of single or multiple location sna specialties at once, and seamlessly move between the two search fields while not losing position.
In the latest designs, both search fields were consolidated to one icon. Additionally, research was done across major popular mobile apps, and it was proposed that we follow their lead and move search to the top header and in a fixed position. That way we benefit from a familiar and intuitive placement, and users could access search no matter where they were.
In the new design, we introduced a advanced search feature that allowed users to search by groups of states (locations) called "Compact States". I designed this as a check box that would be easily accessible to the user anytime they had the location input field open. Compact states were made more clear by use of a corresponding color and "CS" icon to indicate their status.
Upon tapping the search icon in the header, users would be directed to a dedicated search screen that allowed them to toggle between the location and specialty searches from the same position. When a field is active, the user can easily see their active search criteria in the selected window, and they can add and remove easily.
Xperience is a feature rich product and we're consistently looking for ways to bring more value to our users. I designed additional map based search features, a more economical and modern job card layout, sign in screens with promotional content, and advanced financial features for mobile app users to track their payroll, financial breakdown, and additional documents.
The Xperience home screen was dated, unintuitive, and uneconimical with space, content, and its information hierarchy.
The first iteration of financial features were essentially placeholder. They acted as jumping off points to redirect users to other external payroll providers, and had little utility to users, often causing additional frustration and friction.
Our Xperience Web sign in screen provided one of our best opportunities to market the new Xperience mobile app. We werent taking advantage of that traffic and knew there was an opportunity to direct users and increase installs.
I designed a series of concepts employing research from competing apps and looking outside the box to apps with similar workflows albeit very different markets like AirBnB. Having conducted extensive user research I knew the greates motivating factor in selecting a job was location and lifestyle, thus designing a flow where users selected opportunities beginning with a fun and inspiring map view.
I mapped out a new flow for users to access overviews of financial information. Development also utilized our finance partner APIs in order to provide account overview data. I then created a series of data visualization snapshots to show our users paystub breakdowns, statements, and cumulative earnings.
I designed a number of similar screens for our marketing landing pages that employed imagery that spoke to our user persona and utillized QR codes and links to the app stores to provide as little friction as possible and improve our customer funnel.
An organized and meticulous process for gathering user feedback is essential to the success of digital products and organizations. At Cross Country Healthcare I led user interviews and research to better understand our users expectations and thoughts around our products. I then distilled our feedback and presented our findings to leadership with actionable intelligence that led to a number of valuable features and enhancements and strategic initiatives.
After writing and testing a line of questioning and refining our script, we collected user feedback through a series of interviews.
Affinity mapping feedback we gained via our interview process. Affinity mapping was one step that went into the process to yield unbiased and valuable qualitative data.
The findings from our interviews and research processes were then presented to the Product Team leadership to provide action items for future sprints.
User feedback was recorded and organized for further analysis.
Showing one of the steps that went into our user feedback. The feedback and insights gained from research were distilled into an affinity map to yield valuable overarching consistencies in our qualitative data.
Showing a condensed version of the results presentation delivered to the product team and leadership.
Assembling meticulously built design systems to increase design efficiency, enforce design QA standards, facilitate development handoff, and provide a single source of truth.
Using an expanded color pallet based on our brand color, we built a compliant mobile friendly palette for Cross Country's branded digital products.
A detailed components library was assembled. Some aspects of the library shown below.
