Calendar Application Management

Overview

Timeline

6 weeks from research to solution
2 sprints for development

Role

Lead Product Designer

Abstract

Imagine you're interested in someone but they seem slow to respond, or worse, they ghost you. Well our clinicians basically have to go through the chances of that happening every time they submit an application to a shift. This case study outlines how I solved for quicker response times from our facility partners.

Background

Facilities are often unaware how waiting on an application can affect a clinician’s trust in them. Clinicians show their interest in working for a facility when they apply for a shift. When an application goes without a response for too long, clinicians will withdraw believing they have a better chance finding shift opportunities else where or have already found work some where else. Slow to respond facilities not only lose the opportunity to fill their shifts, but also give off the impression that applying is not worthwhile as clinicians are doubtful of hearing back.

This slow behavior also hurts connectRN as we lose opportunity to fill the shifts and capture revenue. Clinicians seek our help to reliably fill their schedule and be a source of income, so they also lose faith in our brand if they feel we only serve them dead end work opportunities.

Problem

During, a workshop I was facilitating with my Product Manager, we found a common pattern around facilities, especially among new ones, not understanding the consequences of waiting on applications. This becomes an issue when a clinician never receives a response, or gets accepted far too close to the shift start time for the clinician to prepare for the shift.

As a work around, account managers have to reach out and give them guidance. If our team doesn't take these proactive additional steps, they have found these facilities are more likely to exhibit bad behavior from the get go.

Problem Area Metrics

66%

Of all shifts are non-instant accept*

25%

Of all applications ended with a withdrawal status

63%

Of all withdrawals were manually done by users**

$6m

Loss in revenue from manual withdrawals

*Although facilities have the option to allow clinicians to instant accept shifts (meaning no review needed), most facilities opted out so they can have more control

**Auto withdrawals are done by our system. This happens if a clinician has applied to multiple shifts at the same time and gets accepted to one. Manual withdrawals are done purposefully by the user and usually signifies they cannot do the shift anymore or lost interest.

User Research

Overview

I partnered with account management to send out a simple user survey to our schedulers around their thoughts on application withdrawals.

Survey Outline

Who usually responds to applications?
When do you respond to applications?
If you wait to respond, what is your reason for waiting?
How have withdrawals affect your shift planning?
Imagine a feature on our platform that indicated to you which shifts have pending applications and which are likely to be withdrawn, how helpful would that be?

Participants

Survey was sent to 40 facilities across our largest markets in Maryland and Virginia
Historically, facility personas are the hardest to receive feedback from, so it's not surprise only 5 schedulers completed the survey

Results & Next steps

We have found, on the surface level schedulers, do try to respond quickly; however, they are still experiencing stress due to application withdrawals
Based on free written responses, schedulers feel those who withdraw are clinicians who aren't reliable, when in reality clinicians are withdrawing for other work opportunities
Using this feedback, we created more direct messaging within the design solutions to reflect how it’s on the facility to take action and why applicants are really withdrawing.

Early Ideation

I designed with two things in mind:

To educate our facility personas on how waiting on applications can hurt their chances of fill
then guide them to where the action needs to be taken.

Initially we also wanted to pursue nudges around posting more shifts further out to avoid call outs; however, after conducting further analysis, I could not find correlation with any benefits to posting weeks out.

As a result we pivoted to solely focus on application responses after the stakeholder survey phase.

Version 1:

Stakeholder Feedback

"Hi Team! Love both of these ideas. I think there would be immediate benefit to implementing both! We all know that most people don't read more than the subject line of an email or the article title SO I love the color coding of the calendar and kind of forcing them to read/acknowledge the tips...Idea 1 / Aged Applies Nudges & Calendar Color Coding - LOVE the color coding. No comments from me!..."

- Director of Lifecycle Marketing

"In App color coding and nudges will be helpful. Emails nudges will get lost and rarely touched."

- Account Manager

Overall this idea scored a 4.1/5 for confidence across all teams.

"Encouraging best practices directly in the UI makes total sense to me. I was on a product team that did a version of this at one point and it was pretty successful, in particular for newer customers which this is obviously gauged for!"

- Senior Product Manager

Collaboration Design

Design team

Throughout the design process, I had brought this idea to the design system team for UI and flow input. They had also been working on our brand's color palette alongside this project, so there was a dramatic switch in how we used color to convey messaging.

Engineering

I had brought up this idea early on to understand what existing logic and break down details of new logic we would be adding.

Life Cycle Marketing

My PM partner and I understood the success of this feature heavily relied upon facility users logging into platform so we worked with the Life Cycle Marketing to draw up some communication strategies to drive them to our platform. During this time, the company was in the midst of transferring communications from Hubspot to Iterable, so it was important we understood what the capabilities were with Iterable.

Email Designs with Marketing

Immediate Results

This feature work was completed and launched July 2023. With just one month of monitoring, we found:

Withdrawal rates went down by 28%, and applications with no response went down by 33%
Email engagement rate increased from 10% to 25%
Facilities responded with positive feedback to our Account Management team during their monthly sales health checks