Reverse

At the end of this phase, we returned to Reverse insights mapping. A cluster of possible intervention, expectations and opportunities emerged, such as operation on mandates, planning, shared knowledge, trust and human relationships. This is what we also call “the situation as it is”. Using this information as a basis, we helped Reverse to think about their process as they had “to be”. We suggested adopting a business perspective that would take into account priorities and discuss the reasons behind the desired changes, beyond the research indications.

After a week, in a two-hour meeting, Reverse described HR consultants' ideal working process. They outlined a process in which consultants were helped to see and unlock their business while understanding its relevance, having valuable information at their fingertips for Clients or Candidates, and building a collaborative and transparent relationship. It is precisely this latter aspect, proposing collaborative recruiting as a differentiating approach to competitors, that was crucial for Reverse.

Furthermore, the speed of response allowed us to work at our best. Proposals concerning generative codesigns are often difficult to understand because of their complexity. Usually, they are accompanied by sketches that require a great abstraction ability. Therefore, we usually prefer to take more time to elaborate a final draft before presenting it to the client. Reverse, instead, preferred to give us feedback on rough ideas, helping us to skim them and identify the most interesting concepts accurately and quickly. This allowed us to create a prototype in just over three weeks and test it with the consultants.

Therefore, we started the second month of work from scratch and ended with a tested prototype. Afterwards, the team turned it into a list of functions and scheduled deliverables and releases roadmap, perfectly synchronised with the back-end team.

Involving customers in product definition is crucial

Our priority was to define a methodology to select abstract thoughts and arrive at a convergence and axioms useful for the communicative definition of the product. We organised a workshop with the client in which we were able to outline values and founding principles for this type of tool. We defined the style, the tone of voice and - last but not least - we highlighted what the new tool shouldn’t have been.

In addition, defining the system communication channels was very effective. This allowed us to determine a more consistent interface, perfectly aligned with the type of use the users would make of it. We designed a product that is almost exclusively for internal use (HR consultants, team leaders, scouts). The tool would not only perfectly suit characters, rituals, jargon and Reverse personality but also highlight its distinctive features and enhance a familiar language.

Design system: a product that makes products

A virtuous system is supported by another one that helps define modularly interface elements, allowing them to evolve and change without production overload. Therefore, for this project we adopted and produced a Design System to formalize all the brand experience aspects and make tangible founding principles of the application. Through a repository shared with the client, we implemented a Pattern Library of code components, ready to be integrated, tested and refined according to received feedback.

Each component has been designed and developed to carry design principles and combine functional patterns (buttons, inputs, labels) with perceptual patterns such as colours, typography, spacing, icons and microcopy.

The Pattern Library was built with Fractal, an effective tool for developing, documenting and integrating web components into a project. The HTML and CSS code development has been done using the atomic design methodology, i.e. building small components which in turn are incorporated into larger components to create templates and pages.

The front-end code is static and agnostic so that it can be integrated into any codebase and work with any Javascript framework, React.js in the specific Jarvis project. In fact, the integration of our code has been quite linear and fluid without any particular complications. Two factors played a crucial role:

• a well-documented and punctual Pattern Library to allow optimal code reading;
• constant alignment between our front-end team and Reverse's development team (integration and backend).

Innovating production through continuous improvement

Continuous feedback exchanges with the IT team played an especially important role in the application development and, above all, made it possible for us to understand and immerse ourselves in both product and technical logic. In fact, we worked as an extension of the Reverse development team..

The work made on the Design System made us realise even more its potential and its importance as an auxiliary to make the tool flexible, scalable and maintainable over time. A few months after the release of the Jarvis Design System, in fact, Reverse used it autonomously to add new activities aimed at another type of user working on another service.

In addition to the design itself, an important task of the design team was to identify success metrics and KPIs, interview and involve users in testing functionality and producing content, as well as rework improvements based on what emerged from the users.

At the same time, a team of researchers worked on collateral aspects of the software. The synergy between this team (discovery team) and the project team (lean design team) ensured consistency between the discovery team’s framework and the project evolution. Furthermore, the research results were reworked to build new functionalities. This mutual exchange was synchronised and it opened up brand new opportunities, both technological and service-related.