Role
Product designer
Timeline
August, 2022 - Present
Group
Caoyang Shen
Yin Li (Founder)
Tools
Figma
Background
Work complexity causes misalignment between employees, positions, and the organization, leading to workplace inefficiency known as "quiet quitting."
SylphAI resolves staffing challenges and boosts client productivity through unified staffing and AI-driven collaborative project solutions.
Pain point: Existing flexible work solutions fall short
Design Challenge
How might we enable clients to search for and onboard talents quickly?
Design Solutions
See what SylphAI does to solve the problem
Quick hiring process
The quick process involves three steps: search, negotiate, and hire. We streamline the contract signing by taking care of it for our clients and teams, ensuring a hassle-free experience for everyone involved.
Flexibility
SylphAI integrates plenty of project management tools and payment systems to help clients and talents save time in exploring suitable tools.
Achievements
We now have:
1000+ AI professionals and talent seekers.
5 successful projects.
10% weekly user growth.
Research·Market Research
Shortcomings of current platforms
💔01. Position-oriented hiring makes skills mismatching.
Traditional platforms struggle to match clients with experts in the diverse fields of the AI industry and projects.
💔02. Multiple project software increases cost.
Currently, there is a need to onboard hired individuals from staffing platforms onto separate project and payment management platforms, leading to increased working costs.
What should SylphAI solve?
❤️01. Project-level hiring provides the fittest.
To ensure a successful match, we rely on clients to provide a clear project idea, enabling engineers to assess their suitability for the job accurately.
❤️02. One platform solves staffing to payment.
SylphAI provides users with a one-stop experience, allowing them to manage their projects seamlessly, including staffing, contract signing, and payment processes.
Research·Persona
Mike Smith / Secondary persona
35 years old
Freelancer AI engineers
Different clients require developers to use different project platforms
About
Lina Choi, the innovative founder of an AI company specializing in clothing matching and fashion management, faces the challenge of hiring and managing personnel without the budget for a human operator.
Frustration
She currently handles the hiring, onboarding, and payment processes using various software platforms, adding to her already stressful workload of marketing and pitch deck preparation.
I am seeking a solution that frees me from the complexities of Gusto, Notion, and Indeed.
About
Mike Smith, a seasoned AI researcher, recently experienced a layoff that prompted him to become a freelance developer.
Frustration
However, he finds it frustrating to deal with different clients who require him to use multiple project management, payment, and meeting platforms.
I now have numerous accounts and receive countless advertisements from various platforms daily!
Lina Choi / Primary persona
30 years old
Founder of AI Startup
Onboarding new talents take plenty of time without HR
Design Starts
In order to make the design process understandable, we will focus on the client's angle.
Let’s meet our friend, Princess Peach!
Design·User Flow
Princess Peach recruits Mario and Luigi, the most suitable team for her mission. In our software, Princess Peach has the ability to comprehend and track the progress of Mario and Luigi's work, as well as facilitate payment to them whenever necessary.
1. Project Dashboard · Neat
As a project-oriented platform, we provide users with a clear and intuitive dashboard that enables them to comprehend the status of each process easily. Our platform also offers robust filtering capabilities, allowing users to efficiently locate specific projects, even when they have a large number of projects.
2. Sourcing · Detail
Our primary goal is to enhance clients' ability to browse and connect with the most suitable talents quickly. Through extensive interviews and discussions with AI experts, we have identified the key information to include in each project listing.
To address user dissatisfaction with internal talents, we provide an AI-powered talent search button at the top right corner, enabling users to explore talent outside SylphAI.
To simplify contract creation, users are guided through a question-based process, automating contract generation.
We seamlessly integrate project tools like CodeSpace, Notion, and Linear into SylphAI, eliminating the need for individual onboarding.
3. Onboarding· Convenience
Design·Hi-Fi Solutions
4. Payment process· Transparency
Our system enables convenient salary processing and hiring status tracking. In the image on the right, Yan Su receives bi-weekly payments, and our system automatically records and organizes work situations into two-week periods.
The files area securely stores documents accessible only to Yan Su and her clients, including auto-generated invoices and W2 forms.
To prevent accidental contract terminations, we enhance the visibility of a designated danger zone, ensuring users are fully aware of the consequences of their actions.
Design·Design Iterations
We make this change based on three reasons.
Simplify users’ management of their teams and projects, and add a filter to locate the wanted project quickly.
Improve the visual effects of the filter.
Enrich each card with valuable information.
Based on user feedback, we have identified that some users found it challenging to understand the user flow of staffing, especially when tabs are too many.
Merge the "Saved" sections into the "Search" tab, simplifying the user interface.
Narrow the filter, allowing more space to accommodate users’ information.
Reposition elements, such as the search box, to more logical locations for improved usability and to prepare space for future design.
1. Reducing the click frequency and enriching the information on one page.
2. Improve the useability, making users to have a better experience on searching talents.
After launch, we underwent a design iteration according to the feedback of users and the founder.
Design·Design System
1. Usability Improvement
Regarding the proposal process, we only allow team members to look at the process without any uploading, considering of development difficulty. However, in the future, we should introduce AI to sort and organize the files, enabling different roles to participate in the discussion before the project starts.
Next Step
2. Visual Improvement
In our development process, our primary focus has been on function realization. However, moving forward, we acknowledge the importance of paying attention to font usage and UI element settings. Our goal is to ensure that users can easily obtain the desired information without unnecessary visual distractions. We are committed to refining the overall user experience and optimizing visual clarity in future iterations.
Reflection
1. Learning is the first step of design
At the very beginning of the company, the designers very easy to follow their own ideas and the founder’s thoughts. Before launch, we were not able to be exposed to actual users’ data. Considering the case, the comparators analysis is critical for designers. We understand others’ designs by visiting Dribbble and Medium, then apply them to our platform. When I review my design, I always ask myself questions:
what do others do in this step?
Have I seen a similar design or user flow in others’ work?
2. User need is a key but not everything
We always want to improve the user experience, especially during school projects. However, in practice, a designer will think more. Whether the developer team can understand and realize the demand, whether the benefit overweighs the cost, and whether the design improving the user experience will harm the company’s benefits. What can be conceded and what cannot is also an issue for a designer to think about.
