Reinventing staffing
From startup agility to enterprise scale
Bluecrew was a start-up digital staffing platform offering a W-2 employment model, a stark contrast to the industry’s gig-based 1099 approach. In October 2022, Bluecrew was acquired by Employbridge, a major traditional staffing firm, with the goal of modernizing its operations through automation and SaaS efficiencies. My role evolved across two distinct phases—first as the sole designer driving hands-on UX/UI improvements, and later as a UX Director leading a team through a large-scale platform redesign.
Hands-on design & early impact
Designing for both the worker & company teams at the outset, I focused on usability improvements driven by data (Google Analytics, Pendo) and direct user research. I conducted client calls and leveraged insights from the Account Management team to identify major UX pain points.
One major hands-on achievement was the Timesheets Redesign — a feature initially built without design input and limited to internal use. I transformed it into a fully customer-facing experience, aligning it with our Blueprint Design System and launching a beta in late 2023. Early data showed high adoption and a 25% reduction in Account Manager time spent resolving timesheet issues.
Another key project was optimizing the "Post a Job" workflow. Research showed users were continuously recreating Position & Schedules unnecessarily. Through rapid user testing and a Lightning Swarm sprint, I led quick UX fixes that reduced time-on-task by 17% and cut down duplicate entries simply by displaying more details during flow.
Design System stewardship
From day one, I noticed that the existing Blueprint Design System was underutilized. Many components were being manually recreated in individual files instead of designers leveraging the system properly. I collaborated with the other designer to relink components, extend the design system, enforce consistency, and drive adoption.
Beyond just promoting usage, I actively worked on improving the system itself. I dedicated time each week to:
Organize & maintain components
Add necessary variants for flexibility
Ensure new elements were properly documented and incorporated
Once my team was in place, I appointed one of my designers as the Design System Shepherd, ensuring continued improvements and documentation updates.
Representing for AI in UX
In 2023 the data team started experiments using AI agents on the back end to dig through the database for help predicting attendance based on job & worker information for the purposes of determining the appropriate overfill percentage.
I had my design team brainstorm possible applications for the front end which lead to the conception of an Vertical AI Copilot. We designed a robust help/support module that would understand the company’s staffing history and operational rules — able to suggest, schedule, and manage workers directly through natural language requests from the user. I tried to talk them into supporting voice but it seemed that was a bridge too far.
While I was starting to get some traction on the idea internally the company was suffering financially and that’s when the layoffs hit in Summer 2024.
Leading the full-scale platform redesign
As our team grew, I transitioned from hands-on execution into leading a deep redesign, focusing on information architecture (IA), extensibility, and dashboard UX. We built a prototype of a limited-scope redesign while aligning our work with the company’s new backend framework, balancing bold improvements with continuity for existing users.
Our redesigned platform introduced a new IA & navigation system optimized for scalability, an actionable dashboard that structured daily action items with "Yesterday/Today/Tomorrow" visibility and a phased approach, ensuring stability while avoiding major disruptions to user workflows
Unfortunately, corporate shifts in 2024 resulted in major layoffs, and I was unable to see the full vision through to launch. However, I take pride in the impact of my work — both in driving meaningful UX improvements and establishing a stronger design foundation for the future.
Selling the vision
While collecting support for the Product Team initiatives across the organization, I built this sizzle reel representing the major parts of our proposal for use in meetings with the executive team & the board of directors.