Giving every company an army of interns

How we unified smart home devices in one app

Everyone's private army of interns

Hemingly was first started as an effort to help indie authors better manage their marketing. Although the idea never took off, we learned how to leverage Amazon Mechanical Turk to summon an on-demand force of office workers. In fact, using MTurk made us so productive that we wanted to give the power of MTurk to everyone, but minus the learning curve. To do this, we had to overcome 2 main challenges:

  • Making task delegation simple : the main barrier to more people using on demand workforce services like MTurk is the high learning curve of creating your first task. Getting the task scope, difficulty, timeline, pricing and instructions right were so difficult that most new users gave up.
  • Building a scalable task dispatch system : on our end, the challenge was to build a system that can receive and dispatch an ever more diverse set of tasks to a culturally diverse workforce.

Simplying task delegation with a chat bot

The most natural way to delegate tasks is via speech. In day to day life, we ask favors, give tasks to employees, assign to-do's to colleagues, etc. all by talking. We therefore designed the task delegation interface entirely as chatbot in Slack. Here are some interaction examples:

screenshots of the final app
This is an example of a task completion message. Instead of redirecting users to an online database/dashboard, the results are communicated just as a work colleague would, that is: in a summarized form and with a consideration for next steps.
screenshots of the final app
This is a v.2 design of the same message. This design converts the text description into a clearly parseable image. It also has clearer CTAs for taking next steps thanks to the buttons.

Making the app extensible with spreadsheets

As the tasks we received grew in number and complexity, it became clear that we would need to build a dispatching software. And so we set out a few design principles:

  • Quick to use for managers: because wouldn't hire new managers in the next 6 months, it was more important to be fast than learnable.
  • Easily extensible for managers: because new types of tasks often required new interfaces
  • Easy to learn for operators: we expected to have high operator turnover so the app needed to be easily learnable for new workers.
  • Sensitive to operators’ culture: the app needed to account for the software familiarity and workplace customs of our global workforce.

To meet all these principles, we built more than half the app on Google Spreadsheets. The platform was immediately extensive thanks to built-in fomulas and Google Apps Script. It also solved many of our localization problems since every worker, no matter their background, was familiar with spreadsheets. Finally, we could also quickly build custom UIs for any edge cases that came up, all without much coding.

screenshots of the final app
This is a sample of our worker tracker. While ugly and difficult to parse for new users, it let us easily add skill categories to track by adding columns or run custom analyses by writing a few quick formulas.
screenshots of the final app
This is a mockup of what our worker tracker would eventually look like. While more pleasant to read, it was far less flexible and therefore never implemented.

Outcome

In 6 months, we built a product that helped 15 companies delegated more than 600 hours of work on our platform. With this traction, we were given interviews by the top 2 accelerators in the world: YCombinator and 500 Startups, with a term sheet for $100,000 of VC investment from the latter.