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Cross Country web app and service design
Recruiters at Cross Country TravCorps help place nurses and other professionals in healthcare facilities for 13-week assignments.
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The situation
Cross Country established industry leadership in part by acquiring smaller companies, which led to some common organizational afflictions including operational limitations, contradictory business processes, and a patchwork IT infrastructure. Cross Country realized they urgently needed to increase the effectiveness of their talent management system.
Over the course of a multi-year strategic business strategy and design engagement, Cooper collaborated with Cross Country to revolutionize its talent management system in order to seamlessly blend multiple channels of communication for the benefit of nurses and staff. In addition to interaction and visual design services, Cooper helped Cross Country align the business to the needs of nurses and recruiters, build their design competencies, improve its software development process, and establish better executive governance over the service model.
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Starting from a holistic perspective
Cooper observed and interviewed dozens of travelers and recruiters around the country to determine their motivations, habits, and contexts of use. The personas and scenarios Cooper created during data synthesis shed light on several business-critical issues. These insights allowed Cross Country to make course corrections on key IT infrastructure projects, and to change important protocols related to their information processing.
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Traveler Portal
With these decisions made, Cooper turned its attention to the design of the traveler (nurse) and recruiter services. Cross Country's Job Search for travelers was one of the first enterprise-level Google Maps mash-ups. It has powerful yet simple searching, filtering and flagging capabilities. Compared to the previous system, job search activity in the new traveler portal has increased by 77%.
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Recruiter Tools
Cross Country's new Recruiter Center relies on rich visual displays like those provided to travelers, and also includes managerial features such as task lists and alerts. By migrating away from confusing and inefficient mainframe systems, the web-based system helps recruiters support more travelers with less effort by giving them visibility into travelers' immediate needs and ongoing status, including the traveler's view of open positions.
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Addressing the big issues
Before engaging Cooper, Cross Country attempted a robust round of system improvements that relied upon a use case-based methodology, but they abandoned this effort when stakeholders were unable to exert quality control over the user experience of the systems they were building. According to John Chaffins, Cross Country's adoption of Cooper's Goal-Directed methods provided management with clear visibility into and appropriate influence over the products and processes they require to run their business. These methods allowed Cross Country to set reasonable priorities for internal technology investments, create roadmaps for future product development, and obtain high productivity and quality from its offshore development teams.
"Having rich visual designs as communication tools lets people focus on things at a different level. Instead of having everyone conceptualize about what it is and how it behaves, they let executives address the big issues and think strategically about business impacts on customers and users."
—John Chaffins, Senior Director, Product Development & User Experience
Cross Country Healthcare
