Kalido
Product design
Maximising organisational and societal prosperity through AI-powered people and opportunity matching
Intro
Kalido is a product that aims to maximise organisational and societal prosperity through AI-powered people and opportunity matching. Company was founded 5 years ago as an Android and IOS app. Using machine learning Kalido crafted a powerful matching engine that can connect people from around the world, help them share ideas, achieve their full potential and broaden their access to various opportunities. Users could create communities, and find like-minded people, but mostly find business leads and job offers.
However, in 2020 the founders decided to branch out and create a web version (mostly used on the desktop) of the product that focuses on the enterprise. The values remain the same - to democratize opportunities and make them accessible to everyone in the organisation. The first client, who is also our main investor, is a big software company in India, with offices around the world.
My role
As a Senior Product Designer, I am working mostly on the enterprise product (web desktop and mobile).
My responsibilities included:
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User interviews and tests
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Idea generation and creating strategy for the product
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Stakeholder interviews and requirements gathering
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Low & high fidelity wireframes
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Prototyping
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Interaction design
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UI design
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Setting goals and writing a hypothesis
Product challanges
Challenges:
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Retrofitting native app, designed for individual users, to enterprise environment (legacy problems)
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Struggle to communicate the value proposition of the product
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Overly complicated user journeys and feature bloat
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Flat UI with no visual hierarchy - users were confused and didn't know how to navigate through the native app
Approach:
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User testing and analysing existing app data to identify the biggest usability issues and tackle them
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Simplifying user journeys, clear signposting
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Creating consistent experience between web desktop, mobile, and the native app
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Pushing back on some features, so users don’t get overwhelmed when they first use the product
Empathy map
Flow diagram
Enterprise client challanges
Project Manager's pain points
In a company of 20k employees Project Managers struggle to efficiently find the right talent for a project. The current HR systems often have outdated information, also searching and shortlisting has to be done manually. Project Managers find it very frustrating and time-consuming.
How Kalido can solve these pain points
When PM creates a new job in Kalido the powerful matching engine will instantly provide them with a list of suitable candidates arranged starting from the best match. It will also give them an overview of the company’s true skills ecosystem and help identify shortages and quickly tackle them. Because at Kalido, we believe that skills and experience are more important and accurate than job titles, the matching will be based on the skills. When PM creates a new job in the system, we can extract the skill set from the description of the project and role - which again saves them a lot of time.
Employees paint points
In the company, employees are working on long term projects that last from 6-12 months, once they are finished with a project they are on a so-called "bench" waiting for another assignment. During interviews we've conducted, a lot of them stressed out that they have to chase Project Managers to get assigned to projects (If they are on the bench for longer than 6 weeks they might get redundant). They don’t have an overview of all projects happening in the company and they feel like they don’t have a lot of control over their career path. They also pointed out that you need to have a good personal relationship with the Project Manager in order to get “good” projects.
How Kalido can solve these pain points
During the Kalido onboarding process, the user will be asked to add their basic information - mainly skills and level of competency, work, and education history. Most of this data will be imported from the company's HR systems or users can do “LinkedIn” scraping, this will minimise onboarding friction points and prevent “empty profiles”. Onboarding is quick and smooth with minimum input from the user, and as soon as they start using the product there is enough data to match them to projects. Users will be encouraged to invest more in their profiles because the more information they provide, the better chances of matching to a great opportunity. Employees will also have a chance to see all the jobs that are happening in the company and express their interest or switch between the projects.
The company paint points
Employees are not motivated and the company has big issues with talent retention. Organisation spends a lot of time and effort on onboarding and training new workers but then struggles to keep them for a longer period of time.
How Kalido can solve these pain points
Kalido will have a chat, various channels and will encourage employees to connect with each other, share ideas and create communities. We will introduce mentoring schemes and ways for users to up-skill or change career tracks. This will make employees feel empowered and in control, which will increase productivity and talent retention which will benefit the company itself.
Current state
Right now we are in the middle of design and development for the enterprise release. Apart from our main investor in India, we have a few other big organisations interested in our product and the value we can bring for them. We are constantly testing our product with users to make sure we are on the right path to create product that users love and which will become a part of their daily lives. We can't wait to deploy the product and gather more data, insights and test our hypothesis. We set goals and tools to measure the success of the product and to identify the pitfalls.
Simultaneously we are working on improving the usability of the native app and trying to make the design in-line with the web product. We have some big ideas in the pipeline, including "Personal Growth Dashboard", an interactive tool which will be using machine learning to help user achieve their full potential.
