Envoy Global - Web
Platform for streamlined employment-based visa applications
Envoy is a web platform where HR managers and foreign nationals can fill out and submit applications for U.S. and global visas. It also facilitates communication with a legal team and provides expiration reminders for government compliance.
When I started at Envoy, I spearheaded a major visual overhaul of the platform focusing on information architecture and overall user experience.
HR Dashboard - Legacy
On the legacy platform, an HR user would log in and see the “Company Dashboard” — essentially a menu of the different divisions within the company which the user would have to select in order to see the main interface of the platform.
Once a division was selected, the dashboard would transition to become a list of action items the HR user needed to complete for the visa applications within that division. In interviews with HR users, they would say this list often felt overwhelming and the order of items made little sense. The analytics supported these observations, showing minimal interaction with elements on the page and a very short amount of time on the screen before moving to another.
HR Dashboard - Redesigned
The obvious improvement looking between the two is the simplicity of the updated dashboard. When shown to HR users, this “springboard” style dashboard tested way better than other versions due to its digestibility. Instead of an overwhelming and poorly-sorted list of action items, the new dashboard suggests actions in small chunks and is prioritized using an algorithm that factors in things like due dates and document expirations.
An important upgrade to the user experience was not requiring the HR user to have to select a division up-front. Instead, the app now displays content for all divisions the user has access to and then the user can dynamically filter by division or custom group using the menu in the top navigation bar. This removed a massive pain-point for daily users and made every feature within the app much more fluid.
Visa Application Process - Legacy
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Visa Application Process - Redesigned
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Managing Cases - Legacy
In the legacy platform, HR users had a feature called ‘Visa Organizer’ which displayed active cases as well as statuses for existing foreign national employees. While it was originally created to make HR users’ lives easier, the feedback we got was that it was difficult to manage a large number of cases (which is common for enterprise tech companies). The small cards limited the amount of space available to display important information so users would have to drill into each case.
Additionally, users reported that it was often hard to find particular cases without having to explicitly search by the foreign national’s name. The sorting categories were not helpful for this and analytics showed very few clicks on the filter dropdown tucked away in the top right corner.
Managing Cases - Redesigned
For the update, I put an emphasis on the filtering feature to make it both easier to find and use. The ‘Quick Filters’ have commonly used filtering methods while the visa type filters below them are valuable for larger customers. This has led to over a 200% increase in usage for this feature.
The card views themselves are now much larger, allowing for much richer information to be displayed without having to drill into individual cases. While the larger cards reduce the number of cases that fit onto the screen above the fold, larger customers who want to scan dozens of cases can switch to the ‘List View’ option at the top of the screen.
Communication Center - Legacy
The old communication center was somewhat akin to internet forums. You would create ‘posts’ and any responses from the legal team or other parties would be added to the thread.
A pain point for HR users was having to sift through hundreds of threads, many of which they were not involved in. Scanning through a long list of threads involved a lot of scrolling and waiting for more threads to load.
Communication Center - Redesigned
The updated communication center is a mix between an email inbox and messaging apps like iMessage. I wanted to add a human element to the feature by making threads feel more like conversations. Messages now appear in chat bubbles and newer messages display below older.
The inbox-style organization is better for HR users because the layout is familiar, making it more intuitive for them to search and filter through messages. The thread thumbnail list is also much easier to scan and improves the loading performance for large customers.