Rushnote - Organizational Recruitment
PRODUCT DESIGN · USER EXPERIENCE · BRANDING
Rushnote: an easy way to keep track of the potential new members coming into your organization. With Rushnote, everyone will be excited to seamlessly get involved in finding new members. Rushnote is a platform for fraternities, sororities, and clubs that stores each recruit in a Notebook online so that every member in your organization can rate, comment, and react to their recruitment status.
Research, Analysis, Product Design, Branding, User-Testing
MY ROLE
TIMELINE
8 months (continuing)
TEAM
2 Developers
1 Designer (me)
TOOLS
Figma, Illustrator, Photoshop
OVERVIEW
Problem
When trying to find great new members for an organization, it can be incredibly difficult to track of all the faces that you meet along the way. Many times great candidates applying for a club can slip through the cracks because there is no central place to store their information. It's also common that some members of an organization meet a great candidate that others are unable to. Recruiting for clubs & orgs is incredibly hectic, unorganized, and in need of a streamlined, centralized platform.
Goal
Design a simple and user friendly way to streamline the recruitment process for clubs and organizations that allows all members to easily engage & keep track of their recruits and the insights from the members of the organization.
USER RESEARCH
Persona
During the research phase, I conducted interviews within my own organization and two other parallel orgs including 50+ members to get feedback to questions such as "what is the biggest pain point from recruiting new members?" and "what have you used to organize your recruitment in the past?". Along with this, I asked members to reflect about how it felt to be a recruit with prompts like: "what was the worst part of entering this organization for the first time?".
I discovered these three most significant pain points:
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It is difficult to remember the faces, facts, and opinions of each recruit that comes through each event.
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It was frequent that one member would meet someone that another never had the chance to.
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There was no central location for insights, and each organization used a different method that came with unique flaws.
Recruiter Rick
Time involved: 2 yr
🧐
Involvement level: high
PAIN POINT
Tries to meet as many recruits as possible, but has trouble getting everyone's details straight. Wishes that more members would take initiative and get involved with recruitment to reduce workload.
Passive Pete
Time involved: 3 months
😴
Involvement Level: low
PAIN POINT
Isn't very involved with recruitment, but would like to know who is getting invited to join. Doesn't want to be left out but not totally willing to be involved with the whole process.
Novel Nancy
Time involved: 0
🤩
Involvement Level: new
PAIN POINT
Excited to be here! Wants to join the organization and would hate to be forgotten. Dislikes the feeling of having to repeat their name or remind members where they're from and why they're here.
PROTOTYPE & BRANDING
Sketch
I worked in tandem to create branding for Rushnote's logo and color palette while formulating the information architecture. Based on our personas, I knew the product had to be extremely simple, engaging, and personable, feeling "young" to cater towards a college-aged audience.
Wireframe
After creating a basic outline on paper, I moved towards creating low fidelity wireframes on Figma. This is the phase where I started having more in-depth conversations with my developers. Together we iterated on the design, working on the function of the platform, iterating to make the experience as seamless as possible. Looping in the small development team helped to create something that would be easily to implement as well, and they provided great insight into what was technically feasible.
OUTCOME
Style & Branding Guide
After collaborating with my dev team and iterating on numerous prototypes, I worked to establish a visual style for Rushnote and documented it for the dev team. Having the dev team collaborate with me up unto this point provided clarity into what the final product would look like.
I branded Rushnote to encompass aspects of note-taking culture such as the yellow that has been used for Sticky Notes and doodles across the platform similar to what you could find in a notebook. By branding Rushnote this way, a match between the system and the real world can be made: working in "Notebooks" filled with insights, doodles across the pages, and a paper clip in the logo, recruiting with Rushnote feels intuitive.
Final Design for Mobile (Member Facing)
Rushnote's member-facing platform allows for members to review, search, and comment on the recruits within each "Notebook" collection . The Notebook owner can decide what information to collect from each recruit along with their picture( typically name, hometown, phone number, etc.).
Rushnote for our Personas:
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With everyone's name, face, and selected details, Recruiter Rick 🧐 doesn't have to worry about forgetting who he met. Rick is seeing the rest of his organization more engaged with recruitment, and has lightened his workload.
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Passive Pete 😴 doesn't have to do much to get involved with recruitment. He can easily get in the loop with all the potential recruits, and feels engaged interacting with his organizations through the various comments and reviews. The emojis make it fun and allow him to recognize his other members across their reviews.
Final Design for Mobile (Recruit Facing)
Rushnote's recruit-facing platform works in three steps: scan a QR code (or follow a link), snap a selfie, submit your information. Recruits for each organization are easily added to the system.
Rushnote for our Personas:
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Novel Nancy 🤩 can be at ease knowing that she won't be forgotten during her recruitment. She can walk into the house and know that the members have a good idea of who she is.
Final Design for Desktop (Member Facing)
Rushnote on desktop offers similar functionality to the mobile version (review, comment, rate). We found from our research that 87% of our users were mobile.
Desktop provides extra functionality to easily display each organization's unique Notebook code so that recruits can easily scan the code and submit their information. The code can be downloaded to print and display as pictured below.
Impact
Today, Rushnote is used across 12 different universities and over 30 organizations nationwide. As we continue to grow, my team consisting of 2 developers and I are working on implementing the designs outlined in this case study as an update to the Beta version released last year.
As we continue to analyze the impact of our new version through user feedback, below are some testimonials from our current users.
