Alcumus SafeContractor
Automatically fetch insurance documents to ensure safety compliance.
A set-and-forget solution to reduce document review costs by 25% and keep Contractors safe.
Company and Date
Alcumus SafeContractor | Mar 2024 — May 2024
Alcumus SafeContractor | Mar 2024 — May 2024
My Role
Product Design | Workshop Facilitation | UX Research | Design Lead
Product Design | Workshop Facilitation | UX Research | Design Lead
Alcumus SafeContractor is a SaaS that manages supply chain risk by ensuring verified contractors (like electricians, carpenters, and cleaners) adhere to safety, ethical, and sustainability standards.
Contractors have to constantly be compliant with an insurance document called WCB review. Depending on the province, they need to manually update this document to the platform every 3 or 6 months, sometimes even daily. After the document upload, an Alcumus professional has to manually review each one.
In response, we set up to improve this flow to reduce the manual work for the different sets of users. As a product designer, I helped research and design this feature in less than two months. The research and testing involved different sets of users — external and internal.
The new set-and-forget automated feature does most of the work in retrieving documents for Contractors, keeping them always insured and compliant. It also allows Alcumus’ internal team to save around 36 hours per month, as manual reviews are no longer required.
Main goals:
• Improve the satisfaction and retention of current Contractors and reduce complaints + costs when the documentation isn't uploaded correctly.
• Reduce document validation costs for the Alcumus Health and Safety team.
• Reduce document validation costs for the Alcumus Health and Safety team.
The result:
A new feature that allows the whole process to be automated.
• Document review costs were reduced by 25% for Alcumus' internal team.
• Great feedback from users. No more hidden expenses due to not adding the right documentation.
• The components will be reused in other areas of the platform.
The Approach
How might we ensure contractors stay compliant with health and safety insurance documentation without requiring repeated file uploads
Customer complaints showed how frustrating was to keep insurance documentation up to date.
Alcumus SafeContractor recognized this issue through customer complaints, competitor analysis, and insights from the Customer Success team. I lead workshops to better define the problem, understand the potential scenarios for the main users, and agree on goals and KPIs.
Due to my interviews with users and subject experts, I learned that Contractors have to be constantly compliant with an insurance document called WCB review. Failing to do so can bring delays to their work, make them lose the correct compensation if an injury happens, and even can be illegal depending of the location.
Workshop for problem framing and discovery: preliminary information of the problem, evidence, KPIs, and ideas.
By going through the upload process myself, joining our UX watch parties, and looking at existing documentation, I also was able to map how the current flow of actions were done and used that to propose new flows and ways of organizing the information.
Contractors loved the new feature idea when presented in our interviews since they don't often access the application.
During my interviews, I confirmed that Contractors were frustrated with the current way the system operated, so they gladly welcomed a set-up-and-forget idea. This idea was being analyzed by the engineers, but we knew we had a chance of developing it.
I also learned that contractors don't log into SafeContractor often, so we needed other notifications outside the platform to keep users always informed if a document is invalid or expired.
Failing to have valid insurance documentation is risky, as it could lead to loss of benefits, profit loss, and work delays — it's our job as a Health & Safety platform to alert and assist users to be insured.
→ I also looked inward to the internal team, since they had undocumented concerns. I brought them into the design process to understand what scenarios were possible and the risks of overlooking certain details of the implementation.
Inspired by the book Continuous Discovery Habits, our interviews became snapshots that could be easily shared amongst non-designer channels. We were continuously interviewing users.
We had plenty of integrations with Microsoft Dynamics to send emails based on events.
Frequent iteration and communication created fewer surprises (and rework).
Due to my scenario mapping and frequent communication with our stakeholders, engineers and subject experts, we quickly uncovered relationships with other areas of the product and avoided rework. I was able to communicate our work across squads so other designers and developers knew what was changing.
This also showed us some areas that needed more attention like document statuses, error messages, notifications, and UX copy. Areas that affected the platform as a whole.
All possible errors were listed in a table during meetings. We were using it to also imagine flows and next steps for users.
We had plenty of limitations with error messages and error prevention. However, I was able to advocate (and write) more helpful error messages.
Work-in-progress Figjam file containing scenarios, constrains, and plenty of questions for stakeholders.
A big chunk of this project was about how the interface would behave in case of errors or technical difficulties.
Results.
Contractors must have their insurance documents up-to-date otherwise they can face delays at work, or even worse: lose the correct compensation if an injury happens.
This new feature allows the whole process to be automated:
Great feedback from users.
Their insurance documentation will always be up-to-date from our end. This reduces potential hidden expenses for the Contractor and increases satisfaction, brand equity and customer retention.
Their insurance documentation will always be up-to-date from our end. This reduces potential hidden expenses for the Contractor and increases satisfaction, brand equity and customer retention.
Document review costs were reduced by 25% for Alcumus' internal team.
Since the team doesn't have to review each document manually anymore, around 36h per month were reduced.
Since the team doesn't have to review each document manually anymore, around 36h per month were reduced.
A feature to be reused in other areas of the product.
This feature allows us to replicate the UI patterns to other areas of the platform, accelerating the process of automating user tasks — the main goal of Alcumus’ product roadmap at the time.
This feature allows us to replicate the UI patterns to other areas of the platform, accelerating the process of automating user tasks — the main goal of Alcumus’ product roadmap at the time.
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Credits:
Product Owner: Julien Nadon.
Product Design: Marcos Duda.
Engineering: Michael Miousse, Anthony Brière, Hui Feng Zhou, and more.
Scrum master: Lesley Mager
QA: Jessica Lefebvre
+ The whole team at Alcumus SafeContractor
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