Ferry Machine is a family-owned manufacturing company based in Little Ferry NJ that designs and builds machines for other businesses. Their custom products includes but is not limited to: aerospace engines, medical supplies, and military vehicles. With a swath of clients and freelancers, the company had a time-consuming and cumbersome onboarding process for its contingent workforce. As a freelance intern/student representing RUCS, I was asked to analyze the existing procedure and propose a more efficient protocol.

UX Best Practice

My overall design process is iterative and based on the double-diamond model of UX. The process of this project in particular consisted of several phases of research and adjustment of user flow diagrams.

The later phases of this project consisted of prototype creation and adjustment towards a final streamlined solutions. Overall, the UX process should be used to uncover what's in "plain sight" and I think this project encompasses that idea very well.

Notably, only 1/3 of managers were satisfied with the existing onboarding protocol, and 15% were not satisfied with the process at all. 51% “neutral” about the process was also more than satisfactory, as it could be interpreted as managers/contractors losing interest in the process.

Context Survey
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To follow up the data collection, and to better understand why so often the onboarding process would take so long, I developed a short, open-ended survey to gauge how the users were feeling about their current situation.
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1. What are your key challenges in the current onboarding process?

2. What would you like to change for the better experience?
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A contextual analysis of responses revealed that both managers and contractors would like to:

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• Have a standardized checklist and a visual timeline

• Delegate calculating a due date to the system
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• Be given a timeframe of when a task can be completed instead of just having a deadline
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• Organize tasks into two to-do lists – for a manager and contractor

Affinity Map
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To better visualize these key discoveries, I arranged the data as an affinity map to better sort and prioritize ideas.

Analyzing the old onboarding chart made clear why managers wanted to make changes.

It had three key drawbacks, including:
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1. Due dates were assigned as “Day 5” or “3 days prior.” This was inconvenient and time-consuming to those involedHaving only a deadline date instead of a “start” and “finish” dates slowed down workflow

2. No visual chart, which inhibited monitoring progress

3. Missing a point of contact for additional information, which wasted time as welll.

There was no ambiguity anymore. The research stage made it clear what had to be designed and what were the real problems that needed to be solved.. The final protocol needed to include: clear, concise to-do lists for managers and contractors, the automatic calculation of clear due dates, and a visual representation of the task flow.

At the time of this project, there were two limitations of the delivery of the project: time and money. The company did not want to spend money on complex onboarding software, as it likely would be more expensive in the long term, and we only had a few weeks to deliver a solution. Therefore our prototype and project would be delivered through the classic Microsoft Excel. This may seem like a far cry from custom onboarding suite software programs, but Excel offered a multitude of advantages over those programs including: familiarity, customizability, and simplicity.


I sketched two concepts for how the timeline would be represented: date based and task based. Task based was ultimately determined to be more conducive to the type of work being assigned, so we forward with that one.

The final protocol was designed based on my whiteboard sketches and one of the Vertex42 templates , customized for the needs and branding of the Ferry Machine company. It includes two timelines, which can be adjusted by general management or HR. To undergo the onboarding process, users only need to input name, email, and a start date. The system does the rest. Due dates are given automatically and each task is assigned to make onboarding as efficient as possible.

To evaluate the impact the implemented protocol would have on business, after presenting the new apporach, we asked managers how much time they would most likely spend for onboarding with a new protocol. 89% of respondents anticipated a need up to 3.5 hours max (in contrary to 5 hours with the old procedure) to onboard one contractor which saves them each at least 216 hours a year to focus on strategic tasks. Between all of the managers and contractors, that's over 10000 man hours per year!

Looking Ahead

The proposed protocol enabled is predicted to manage the onboarding process far more effectively. However, as mentioned earlier, this project had financial and time constraints that didn’t allow other useful functions to be added. For instance, tracking a progress in a real time. In the future, when the company is ready to invest more time and money, this and other functionalities may be done by moving the process to one of the HR programs they are using already.

The research phase was some of the most fun I had doing a UX project, and I learned a lot as well. Even simple too like Excel can be applied in ways that have a meaningful impact. At the end of the day it's not the tools you have that determine how far you'll go, it's how you use them.