2023
Creating a talent board
Responsibilities
UI Design
UX Research
Platforms
Web
StudentFinance (SF) is a UK-based company that provides private student loans for those looking to upskill and possibly change careers. They differentiate themselves from other loan providers by allowing the students to only start paying back once they reach a certain level of income. On top of that, there’s also a maximum repayment cap.
With a growing number of individuals considering changing careers (60% in the UK in 2022), it seems like the natural next step for SF is to try and provide a way to help its users find employment more easily, mainly for a few reasons:
To serve this purpose, StudentFinance decided to create a job aggregator, and it would be integrated into their already existing platform that manages the user’s student loans.
Project scope
User flows: From filling out jobseeker profile to browsing job listings
Design end-to-end
Constraints
3 week timeline
Use pre-established design language
This case study was completed on August of 2023. Having accumulated a lot of experience since then, I’ll will be leaving a few comments throughout this case study briefly giving my opinion when looking back.
1. The problem
The dread of job-hunting
Job boards like LinkedIn and Indeed have a high volume of job listings, but lack the features that allow users to more accurately filter the jobs that actually match with the users’ values and goals. This system of “quantity over quality” can often times make job searching a more tedious and frustrating process than it should be.
To address this, the user needs an effective and efficient way to find a job in their new field of expertise that aligns with their career goals and professional values because they want to find a company and a role that they’re content working for in the medium to long-term.
2. The process
Planning the design approach
During the kick-off meeting of this project, StudentFinance made it clear that the job board that they wanted was still just an idea with a single mission: To connect job seekers with companies that reflect the user’s professional ideals and preferred way of working. Other than that, we were jumping in blind.
To solve this, extensive research was in order. This wasn’t a project were I would get to iterate after handoff so it was fundamental to understand the problem thoroughly from the very start. For that, I needed to answer questions such as “What are the big players doing?”, “What works and doesn’t work for them?”, “What are their strengths and weaknesses?”, etc. Therefore, I found that a competitive analysis was needed before trying to empathize with the users through interviews. The main takeaways regarding the most relevant competitors were:
When it came to understanding the users, the SF had a couple of personas, but based on the insights I got from the interviews, none was truly representative of a user that was facing the frustrations of job hunting under special circumstances. Therefore, I decided it was best to create a persona and user journey map that more accurately depicted the opportunities and pain-points in the user experience.
3. Research
Understanding the user
To create a persona and user journey map, I needed user research. The insights I needed to collect were about the users’ motivations, frustrations, and habits. This meant that the research at this stage benefitted from being qualitative in nature. To achieve this, 6 individuals from all over the world were interviewed. Some of the questions asked were:
What were the main factors you looked for the last time you searched for a job?
Can you run me through your most recent experience using a job board?
How do you assess if a job listing aligns with your values/needs?
Once done, I put all the information I had gathered, both from the secondary and primary research, into an affinity diagram. The main insights gathered about the user’s experience were the following:
Motivation
Work-life balance
Compensation/ benefits
Behaviour
Search through filters
Prioritize platforms with high volume of job listings
Pain-points
Inconsistent information structure
Inconvenient application methods
Little mention of compensation and benefits
Now with all the insights gathered and organized, I could finally create a persona and a user journey map. Meet Joana, the struggling self-improver:
Joana’s past few years working in the architecture industry have left her unsatisfied by the lack of career growth opportunities, and a salary growth alike. Not being able to work in an environment where she feels valued by her employer has only contributed to this sentiment.
Frustrations:
Difficult to find a role in a company that matches her values and level of experience.
Inconsistent and overly complicated application methods.
Inaccurate labelling of some job listings (e.g. Entry level positions that ask for 2 years of experience).
Job postings can vary so much from each other in terms of information structure within the same job board.
4. Ideation
Designing for quality over quantity
Since most job boards are not optimized for the actual job searching experience, I concluded that the UX of this job aggregator needed to feel like the user was using a simple but more powerful tool compared to the alternatives. This solution had to be something that inspired confidence and reliability, while still being easy to use. However, in order to make this design visually coherent with the rest of SF’s platform, the hi-fi wireframes were styled with SF’s design language in mind.
Before jumping into hi-fi wireframing, I did some paper wireframes to get my vision down and use them for a quick usability test.
Note: While you’ll see elements titled “Progress tracking” and “Get better at applying” present in the prototype, these features were out-of-scope for this project and therefore were not further developed.
To address the users pain-point that I gathered from the interviews, I implemented a few solutions that are not commonly found on other job boards:
A more “straight to the point” summary of the position and company. This is present on the top of the job listing and provides a lot of easily identifiable information about the position in a standardized format for better browsing.
A list of words mentioned in the job listing that relate to the user’s professional core values. This allows the user to immediately get an idea if there are any aspects in which they identify with the company’s work culture without having to carefully read through the entire job listing.
A segmented control that allows the user to switch views between the job listing, the company profile, and insights from other applicants all on the same page. This allows the user to make a more informed decision before deciding if they want to go forward or not with the application.
Collapsible and rearrangeable information sections within each job listing. Let’s say the user wants to see the job requirements in listings before anything else. By rearranging the sections, all job listings going forward will show the job requirements first. This allows the user to see what they value the most first, as well as more quickly identify where the information they are looking for is.
5. Results
A job board that empowers the user
Get in touch
+351914084854
zemariaacampos@gmail.com