Kamana
TLDR: Solving the complex workflows of hiring, employee credentialing, and targeted record-keeping by building a strategic design process that transitioned Kamana into an enterprise-level job marketplace solution.
My Role
Entering this engagement as a Design Lead, I guided Kamana's team through the growing pains of success by delivering impactful experiences with new product opportunities and cultivated inclusive design as a core value.
UX Audit
Kamana gained early success on it's own, however their platform had inconsistent UI patterns and many confusing workflows. I used this audit to prioritize the design backlog by items of low-effort high-impact.
Advocating For Accessibility
Kamana's newly acquired funding gave their marketing team a rebranding opportunity, leaning towards a modern rebranded gradient look.
This new schema risked significant contrasting issues if adopted in the product UI. By closely partnering with marketing stakeholders I helped guide their work towards an accessible standard.
The Problem
LiveView was too Live.
The first pass at staffing credentials combined LiveView server rendering with real-time sorting.
As recruiters work through a list of credentials they automatically sort before the task was finished. This created a painful experience, which I confirmed by pointing out massive on-page time scrolling in the user analytical data.
The Solution
Less is more.
By understanding how LiveView works, I could remedy this pain point by pausing live credential status sorting, giving users the decision of when their workflow is complete and they want to organize this list.
When this change went live, Kamana received overwhelming positive feedback as this made a recruiters job much easier.
Designers need to be comfortable exploring the technical framework to design solutions that bridge the gap between user experience and meaningful implementation.
I constructed Kamana's new product look and feel into an atomic design system to scale feature consistency across their growing design efforts.
Implementation focused on reusable components to sweep values across both user portals for a united product language.
Validate To Build With Confidence
I helped Kamana's growing team navigate an affordable method for usability testing. Integrating my Figma prototypes into Maze's testing platform gave them new capabilities for executing validation tracks to build confidence in proposed changes.
Before rolling off this engagement, I provided Kamana with a documented design guideline of process, product values, decision history, and product trajectory.
This body of writing is valuable with future team onboarding, conveying the foundational processes that have been established. It is also a starting point for their team to own and evolve this foundation as the product and marketplace matures.
Impact & Outcome
After launching the redesigned product experience, Kamana’s user base doubled along with their annual recurring revenue. The processes I established helped them navigate an effective working cycle where user input had a path to refine meaningful features. I also grew alongside their journey of startup to enterprise by honing in my own design leadership capabilities as a model to inspire perspectives and empower designers to solve challenges.
