Shifts at Snagajob — Josh Crow

The Shifts app showing available hourly shifts as push notifications.

The problem

When I joined, the Shifts team had gone about a year with no designer and no product manager. Decisions still got made, but nobody was checking them against the employers posting shifts or the workers claiming them, and finished design work was sitting unbuilt. I came to Snagajob as an intern and left running my own initiatives. On Shifts, I was the only designer, embedded with the engineers, so each piece of work was mine from the first interview through the build to the release.

The work

The first thing I picked up was a self-signup flow a previous designer had drawn but never built. Before it went to engineering, I tested it with 10 small-business owners. They told me plainly that the flow was too long, that the position-selection page confused them, and that they balked at entering payment before they had asked for a single shift. One owner said the page of colored pill buttons felt like Dr. Mario. I cut the flow down, rebuilt positions as a table with wages and an industry filter, and moved payment past the point where the value was obvious. Then we built and shipped it.

Three versions of the position-selection screen side by side: the original pill-button layout, the tested iteration with user quotes including "It feels like Dr. Mario," and the production table layout with wages and an industry filter. — Original, iteration, production. The middle column carries the test quotes that forced the redesign. From my 2021 portfolio deck.

Talent pools

An unfilled shift costs a manager money, and the workers they trust most are usually the ones already on their payroll. I designed the bulk invites, invite emails, worker notifications, and onboarding that let a manager gather their own seasonal workers into a pool and send open shifts straight to it.

The remote I-9

To put a worker on a shift anywhere in the country, we had to verify that the worker was legally allowed to work there, and Snagajob had no physical presence in most of those cities. I designed a remote I-9 flow on an integration with HIREtech, written to Department of Homeland Security guidelines, that told a worker which documents to gather and walked them through each step on a phone. I tested the wording with 10 location managers and 10 hourly workers, in a cognitive walkthrough and an unmoderated round. The remote I-9 was the first identity verification I ever designed.

Two screens of the remote employment-eligibility flow: section one walks the worker through collecting documents and assigning a completer, section two confirms and hands off for verification. — The remote I-9 flow. Federal requirements, written in plain language for someone filling it out on a phone. From my 2021 portfolio deck.

What changed

By the time I left, an employer could set themselves up on Shifts and post work, a manager could fill a shift from the workers who already worked for them, and a worker could be verified for a shift in a city where Snagajob had no office.

I also set up a charter-customer program, a standing group of employers who met with me every two weeks, so their feedback arrived on a schedule rather than by accident. When COVID closed the stores and warehouses where we had recruited workers in person, I moved that research to the phone and kept it running. With no product manager on Shifts, I ran a standing meeting to carry what we heard to operations, support, and marketing.