Marcos Duda – Product UX Designer - Alcumus SafeContractor

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

My Role
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.

Business goals:

• Improve the satisfaction and retention of current Contractors and reduce complaints when the documentation isn't uploaded correctly.

• Reduce document validation costs for the Alcumus Health and Safety team.

• Improve brand and service reputation.

The result:

A new feature that allows the whole process to be automated.

• Document review costs were reduced by 25% for Alcumus' internal team.

• Initial feedback from external users was positive. No more hidden expenses due to not adding the right documentation.

• A feature that can be reused in other areas of the product.

The Approach

How might we ensure contractors stay compliant with health and safety insurance documentation without requiring repeated file uploads

WCBs? WCIBs? H&S? What are these again?

Alcumus SafeContractor recognized this issue through customer complaints, competitor analysis, and insights from the Customer Success team. When I joined, I had no experience with these insurance documents or this part of the application. My initial goal was to learn through workshops, 1:1 meetings, interviews with users and experts, UX watch parties, and existing documentation, which I continually updated as I gained more knowledge.

Workshop for problem framing and discovery: preliminary information of the problem, evidence, KPIs, and ideas.

We had a document detailing general product journeys. I reviewed it to understand the changes needed for implementing the new feature.

Contractors loved the new feature when presented in our interviews.

However, while researching, I realized we had to look inward to the internal team as well, since they had undocumented concerns and unique cases. I understood what scenarios were possible and the risks we could face if we overlooked certain details of the implementation.

Failing to have valid insurance documentation could lead to loss of benefits, profit loss, delays, and is illegal in some Canadian provinces.

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.

Contractors who need to keep their documents up to date often don't access the application.

I learned that contractors don't log into SafeContractor often. Having a set-and-forget solution was the best, however, we also needed other notifications outside the platform to keep users informed if something went wrong.

We had plenty of integrations with Microsoft Dynamics to send emails based on events.

Frequent iteration and communication created fewer surprises

Due to my frequent communication with our stakeholders, developers and subject experts, we quickly uncovered relationships with other areas of the product and avoided rework.

This showed us some areas that needed more attention like document statuses, error messages, notifications, and UX copy.

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:

Initial feedback from external users was positive.
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 had to review each document by hand, a considerable amount of monthly hours are saved with the new automated feature (around 36h per month for the whole team).

A feature to be reused in other areas of the product.
We had a product strategy roadmap and a big chunk of it was how to automate users tasks. This feature allows us to replicate the UI patterns in other projects of this roadmap.

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Alcumus SafeContractor website

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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