A unique staffing and scheduling solution for temporary workforces, designed to optimise and improve the organisation of businesses, employees, workflows, and management, delivered across a mobile app and a web portal, built from the ground up.
My Role:
Senior UI/UX Designer
Branding · Mobile App · Web App
01
Tempest is a staffing and scheduling platform purpose-built for temporary workforces. The product needed to serve two distinct user groups simultaneously: employees managing their shifts, documents, and availability on the go, and employers overseeing complex operational structures from a web portal. The project was greenfield, meaning everything from the brand identity to the final UI had to be conceived and built from scratch.
02
Temporary workforce management is inherently complex: shifting schedules, document compliance, shift swaps, approvals, and multi-location operations all demand constant coordination. For employees, this often means navigating fragmented communication and unclear processes. For employers, it means managing a high volume of variables with limited visibility. The challenge was to bring all of this into a single, coherent product that felt simple to use regardless of which side of the equation you were on.
03
The approach centred on radical simplicity: an interaction model familiar enough to require no learning curve, a visual language open and readable across a wide range of users and professions, and a consistent design system that could stretch from the lightweight mobile experience all the way to the feature-rich employer web portal. Every design decision was made in service of reducing friction and increasing clarity, for both the worker in the field and the manager at the desk.
The design process began with user flows, mapping every possible action and interaction before a single screen was drawn. Wireframes followed, built on those flows and continuously reworked to surface missing features and edge cases. In parallel, web portal wireframes were developed alongside the mobile experience to ensure structural coherence from the start.
Given the wide variety of users and professions the app would serve, the core design approach was an open, friendly use of color paired with a UI that was immediately readable and understandable. A custom icon set was created to represent each key action type: shift requests, documents, messages, shift swaps, sick leave, and holidays, each visually distinct but tonally unified.
The application design maintained the same simplicity and consistency across all screens, from the login page through worker profile setup, the home feed of notifications and alerts, shift detail views, and calendar management.
Impact
Tempest launched as a complete, end-to-end product covering branding, mobile app, and web portal. The product successfully unified two very different user experiences under a single, coherent design system, bringing clarity to the operational complexity of temporary workforce management on both sides.
Learning
Starting from zero across branding, mobile, and web simultaneously demands a strong conceptual anchor early on. For Tempest, the decision to ground both the logo and the interaction model in the familiar chat card pattern proved to be that anchor: it kept the design consistent and purposeful even as the product grew in complexity. It also reinforced that designing for diverse user bases requires restraint, clarity always travels further than sophistication.
Takeaway
Tempest was a reminder that the best products for complex industries are not the most complicated ones. Temporary workers and employers alike needed a tool that got out of the way and let them focus on the work. When design succeeds at that, it becomes invisible, and that invisibility is the point.
If you're building a product, exploring a new direction, or looking for a senior designer to help shape strategy and execution, reach out.