Case study: When democracy decides your business model
A retrospective on designing for the business-critical cases around California’s Prop 22.
During my time at Instacart there was a major event that upended our whole roadmap and workflow: Prop 22. This write-up is meant to illustrate the design thought and effort that went into our response to Prop 22 and how critical it was to get it right.
Background
Apart from the usual political rhetoric and jockeying that accompanied the 2020 election, California voters had to decide on Prop 22.
Prop 22 was a California ballot measure that the public voted on in the last election cycle. A ballot measure (or ballot initiative) is a way by which the public can create, amend, or repeal a state law or provision through collecting petition signatures. Once it gains enough signatures, it is placed on the ballot to be voted on by the general public.
If Prop 22 were to pass, it would grant app-based transportation and delivery companies an exception to a previous bill that classified these workers as independent contractors, rather than employees. It also would grant them extra protections such as minimum guaranteed earnings, a health insurance stipend and mandate safety and sexual harassment trainings.
If 22 failed, companies would have to treat workers as part-time employees and provide extra mandated employee benefits. This would up-end the current independent contractor model and the benefits that those workers enjoyed (such as the flexibility of working whenever they’d like and how much they work).
A unique challenge
Pass or fail, Prop 22 had serious repercussions for the entire California-based gig-economy and it would affect Instacart Shoppers differently, depending on if they were new or already on the platform–something we identified early in the process.
This project was unique in that it was a tactical initiative to make us compliant with the upcoming law and not driven by more traditional success criteria, like metrics, although we did strive for a simple, clear and insightful experience for our users. Also, both tracks (Pass and Fail) had unique technical and legal constraints which I highlight below.
As the lead designer on the Activation team, I worked with cross-functional partners to set scope, direction and deliverables for the project. I teamed with the copywriter to craft content for the full experience. And I interfaced with other stakeholders to make sure we hit targets and came into full compliance with what was being asked of us by law.
The PASS scenario
We first focused on the Prop 22 PASS commitments. Within the Shopper organization, we had three new core features to execute: guaranteed earnings, health care stipend and, the feature that my team led, Safety Trainings.
The goal
We needed to comply with the new rules laid out in Prop 22 by providing mandatory education courses for 3 topics: Driver Safety, Sexual Assault Prevention & Food Safety (hereby referred to as Safety courses). Also, irrespective of the ballot measure, these courses had the opportunity to reduce incidents and mistakes (reducing cost), or provide positive PR (improved perception). Because of this we decided that the courses would launch for all users and not just the California market.
Tight timelines
While the Operations team worked with the Legal and Brand teams to craft the videos and content for the courses, I as the lead designer focused on the high-level, holistic experience, such as how it would fit into the app, how users would access it and how they would re-enter it.
Since the timeline was tight (2 weeks for design) and after brainstorming other ideas, we made the decision to leverage existing patterns and flows to create this new experience. We would base it off of a similar experience in the app which gave folks information in multiple step-by-step flows that were connected by a single hub or entry screen. This would allow Engineers to get a jump start, speeding along development.
Legal eagle
This feature relied heavily on the Legal team’s input; How do we communicate that it’s mandatory? What wording can we use? What should we avoid? How can we inform them of the timeframe to complete? Their input played a huge role in how we’d communicate this feature to the user. I worked closely with the team’s Content Strategist to craft descriptive, holistic messaging that would explain why these trainings were mandatory (in California) and the timeframe in which they needed to be completed.
We navigated legal challenges daily. When we showed the Legal team the first draft of the experience, they insisted that the user needed to explicitly agree that they understood the material after each course. This would increase friction and add another interaction which could potentially be confusing. We pushed back on this, fighting for a better user experience. After discussing, our middle ground was to add one new screen where the user would explicitly agree to all three courses, instead of a screen for each individual course.
For now, work was done for Safety Trainings. With only 3 weeks left until the vote we asked ourselves: Now, what if Prop 22 fails?
The FAIL scenario
Having the PASS state wrapped up, we quickly pivoted into the FAIL state. Because of the nature of how Prop 22 was written, the existing independent contractor model would be have to abandoned–we had to redefine the entire model of employment for our Shoppers. Time was short and we knew we couldn’t build a full experience in time, so we concentrated on mapping out what our MVP would look like.
Teamwork makes the dream happen
I partnered with another designer and we began to map out the user flow for the new experience.
Initially, many questions came up, such as: What steps do we need to include? What criteria does the user have to meet to complete each step? What trainings are mandatory? What documents need to be in the paperwork step? What’s the legal requirement for an I-9?; in addition to many technical questions: What dependencies does the Workday step have? When will we trigger the background check to run? How long is the waiting period after the I-9?
We worked closely with our Product, Engineering and Legal partners to clarify these as we worked on this new experience, now dubbed the Shopper Team Member model. This work would serve as the roadmap for our eventual MVP.
As we uncovered new constraints, both legal and technical, we would work through them in team discussions. Concessions had to be made around some areas in the flow, such as, certain steps needing to be completed before others due to information dependencies.
From predictions made by our Operations team, the number of Shoppers needed to support all of California would be 45–50k. Active Shoppers already exceeded those needs, so we wouldn’t need to hire new Shoppers in the short-term. Thus the decision to cut the new Shopper onboarding flow and focus solely on converting existing Shoppers to the new STM model was made.
Outcome & Lessons
After the votes were tallied, Prop 22 had passed, nullifying the need for changes to the Shopper employment model. Instead, we released the aforementioned Safety Training courses to a positive response by users (more on that here). The STM work was documented and archived. It may be revisited if other states explore similar, future legislation. The STM work could also be important for when Instacart expands into other countries with more stringent labor laws.
These were very exciting and interesting projects to work on. It’s not everyday that you get to change the entire model of how a business does something, let alone something as important as it’s employment model. And, I also had some key takeaways related to product, collaboration and the business processes used.
Work closely with cross-functional partners
Our success and quick turnaround can be attributed to great collaboration with the Product, Engineering and Legal teams to quickly identify and answer product and technical questions.
Fight for a good user experience
I had to work with very strict constraints, both legal and technical, but still fought for a good user experience.
Failure to launch ≠ wasted time
Even though a good portion of this work was never launched, the flows, patterns and designs created would later help inform future parts of the product.
Not all projects need to end neatly
We all like to show nice positive numbers and outcomes when something launches, but sometimes, that’s just not reality. The true measure of a project or feature is the value added to the business.
I was fortunate to work with many amazing folks while I was at Instacart. My thanks goes out to them for all their hard work on this high-impact project!
