Humanity Health Capabilities Portal
PROJECT TYPE
Applied Case Study- Externship
ROLE
Lead UX/UI Designer - Team of 5 UX Designers
TOOLS
Figma, FigJam, Useberry, Optimal Workshop
Redesign Humanity Health’s recruitment platform to reduce bias and streamline the hiring process for executive-level healthcare talent.
GOAL
Our final prototype received positive feedback from Humanity Health recruiters for its thoughtful integration of the Capabilities Model, achieving a 78.9% task success rate during remote usability testing and offering a clear, scalable solution for reducing bias and streamlining the recruitment process.
OUTCOME
Humanity Health
Capabilities Portal
JAN 2023 - MAY 2023
Overview
Humanity Health is a digital platform committed to increasing C-suite diversity within the U.S. healthcare industry. With people of color comprising less than 15% of executive roles in top healthcare organizations, the company sought to reimagine its recruiting process to reduce bias and improve equity in hiring. As part of a 10-week externship, our team was tasked with designing a Capabilities Portal—a streamlined, centralized platform that would enable recruiters to make hiring decisions based on capabilities, not assumptions.
Project Goals:
Develop an intuitive, bias-reducing tool to support equity-driven recruitment
Consolidate multiple recruitment tools into one centralized portal
Design a seamless recruiter experience that supports job listings, capability summaries, and candidate evaluation
Create a scalable framework aligned with Humanity Health’s mission and brand
Key Contributions:
Conducted stakeholder interviews and comparative analysis of other HR/recruiting tools to understand industry standards and pain points
Performed a literature review to identify key design strategies for reducing bias in hiring systems
Mapped current and ideal recruiter workflows through journey maps, task flows, and IA exercises
Designed high-fidelity wireframes and a working prototype using Humanity Health’s brand guidelines
Ran two rounds of unmoderated usability testing using Optimal Workshop and Useberry, measuring task success and time-on-task
Iterated designs to improve navigation, labeling, and task clarity based on test results and heatmap data
OUTCOME
The final prototype consolidated complex recruitment tasks into a single, user-friendly interface. Recruiters could post jobs, search the candidate database, generate capability summaries, and manage communications—all within one portal. Usability testing showed a 78.9% task success rate, with a median completion time of 8.01 minutes across 21 core tasks. Humanity Health stakeholders praised the thoroughness of the design and its potential to integrate seamlessly into their workflow, particularly given the conceptual nature of the original brief.
What would my next steps be?
Implement a Candidate Matching Algorithm
Develop a system that automatically matches candidate capabilities to job requirements, helping recruiters quickly identify top-fit talent and reduce manual sorting.Build a Branded Partner Portal
Create customized portals for HH clients to streamline their access to job listings and candidate information, improving transparency and collaboration in the hiring process.Integrate with Greenhouse ATS
Connect the Capabilities Portal to Greenhouse—Humanity Health’s existing applicant tracking system—to ensure seamless data flow and reduce duplication across tools.
Framing the Challenge
People of color represent less than 15% of executives in the most prominent U.S.-based healthcare companies.
The core of Humanity Health's mission is to increase diversity, representation, and equity in leadership, so creating a tool that could help reduce bias during the recruitment process is crucial.
Problems
Standard recruitment processes tend to introduce bias, leading to a less diverse workplace.
The current recruiting process is complicated and utilizes multiple applications and systems.
Proposed Solutions
Reimagine the current recruiting and capabilities model.
Streamline the process into fewer platforms and applications.
"How might we create a tool that could effectively streamline all aspects of Humanity Health's recruitment process while reducing the risk of potential bias?”
Comparative Analysis
We researched several other recruiter/HR programs and platforms to get a better understanding of what they offered their users.
User Interviews
Our team had the opportunity to speak with Humanity Health recruiters and administration to gain insight into their recruitment process. Through these interviews, we learned about the methods used to gather information on potential clients and the tools utilized to determine the best candidates for open positions. Although specific details remain confidential under an NDA, we were able to identify a key focus: the development of a portal that streamlines the recruitment process by minimizing the need for additional applications and creating a comprehensive database of candidates that can be easily searched and compared.
Literature Review
To learn more about bias in recruiting and ways to combat it, we read up on relevant studies and articles pertaining to job matching and recruitment bias. We had several takeaways –
Keep in mind the importance of job description wording.
Good job matches are largely dependent on the parsing of CVs and keywords.
Manual checking should still be utilized, even when using software tools.
Asking more questions and making fewer assumptions reduces bias.
HH Recruiters wanted a streamlined system for job posting, creating and storing candidates' capabilities and member information.
Identifying Key Touchpoints and Opportunities
Once we understood the current recruitment process, we created a journey map to help us better understand the different pain points of the user as well as identify opportunities for our portal design.
Key Opportunities:
Ability to easily see and rank capabilities.
Platform accessible to Client and Recruiter.
One integrated and dynamic process and platform.
Searchable candidate information and profiles.
Building a Framework
for Design
Now that we better understood our client's needs and current process, we could build upon them to create a basic user flow, which we then elaborated on in more detail.
Defining Important Tasks
Recruiters had said they were looking for a more streamlined process, with access to capability summaries and member profiles. This task flow depicts that optimized and linear journey.
Identifying Design Patterns Through Rapid Sketching
Our team then held a design studio where through a series of rapid sketches, we identified key ideas, features, and flow that we wanted to carry through to our initial wireframes.
Clarifying Visual Design
Due to the project's time constraints, we decided to make our initial wireframes high fidelity. Our team looked to Humanity Health’s brand guidelines for inspiration and direction in regard to the color scheme and overall aesthetic. >View UI Kit on Figma
Our primary focus with these wireframes was understanding how to minimize friction for the recruiters. We started designing a streamlined process that incorporated the multiple platforms currently being used into one easily accessible portal. The Dashboard, Candidate Capabilities, and Job Posting are the initial main areas of focus.
We used these wireframes to set up a click test using Optimal Workshop. The test involved 19 tasks that the users were asked to complete. With the results, we discovered that users had problems with some of the navigation and labeling systems we had in place, so these were the areas where we focused our attention on the final prototype.
Understanding What Works
and What Doesn't
In applying our findings and suggestions from the first click test, we were able to create our final prototype for the Humanity Health Capabilities Portal. Our goal was to minimize the number of platforms that the recruiters used and streamline their capabilities model. Our final prototype consisted of an interactive portal that would allow recruiters to access job listings from partners, add and edit capabilities, create summaries of candidates for a job, access the candidate user base, and more.
Due to the busy schedules of HH recruiters and our project's time constraints, for this round of testing, we opted to use a plugin for Figma called Useberry. This allowed the HH employees to test the prototype without our team being present and allowed for a more flexible schedule. We opted for the Heat Maps method of testing, and similarly to the first Click Test, we set up 21 tasks that the user had to perform. The tests took the users through the whole portal and its most important functions.
Results
The full application of the UI revealed that while the tasks remained relatively straightforward, some elements could still be reconsidered.
78.9% of tasks were
successfully completed
8.01 Min was the Median time it took to complete all tasks
With the results from our user testing, we found that participants ran into issues stemming from unclear labeling and page content. These issues could be mitigated by improving visibility and clarity.
Some of the issues could also be attributed to there being a learning curve for new users who are unfamiliar with this new dashboard design.
Future Recommendations
Our suggestions at our handoff meeting with HH for the launch of the Capabilities Portal included the following:
1. Adding a Candidate Capability algorithm
With this algorithm, candidates' capabilities would be compared to specific job posting requirements. Creating lists of potential candidates automatically.
2. Create a Partners Portal
A branded partners portal would be created for each client (Company looking to post an open position). Through this portal, they would easily access potential candidates and their information. Further streamlining the recruiting process.
3. Integration with Greenhouse
Leveraging Greenhouse (an application used by HH recruiters to conduct interviews and gather information on candidates) as a back-end service for our Candidate Capability Portal.
Summary
Humanity Health Network strives to empower and advance people of color, specifically within the C-suite. They were looking for ways to implement a way to minimize bias during their recruiting process. Our team worked with HH recruiters to help better understand their process and provide them with a tool that would make their jobs easier while also helping minimize bias within the recruiting process through the Capabilities Model.
Through our research and understanding of the process and capability model, we were able to imagine a brand new tool to help recruiters quickly search, add, and create capability-based summaries for clients, as well as access and search current and past job postings.
Humanity Health was impressed by the level of detail and thought that went into this project. Since the project brief was itself only a concept that HH recruiters were still trying to grasp, they were very excited by the thoroughness of the capabilities model and how our team was able to incorporate it into their current system.
Lessons Learned
1. A streamlined process was key
In the current process, the recruiters at Humanity Health utilized several different applications and systems that were not integrated. With our new Capabilities portal, we could streamline the process so that fewer applications were used.
2. Clairty of navigation and functions matters
During the first round of testing, users were confused by labeling and navigation. Simple language and intuitive user flow were essential for users to know where they were in the process and to be able to complete specific tasks.
3. A learning curve with the new system is to be expected.
As this was a brand new system that had yet to be defined or created by Humanity Health, to have a successful launch, training or tutorials would be needed to help recruiters at HH gain comprehension and fluency within the program.