Once a job is posted, employers come on Indeed to edit their postings, sponsor jobs, update budgets, manage candidates, and more.
Talk about vague, am I right? For this project, I had to learn how to break down broad goals into concrete, actionable problems and design opportunities.
Got 30 seconds? Just watch the video below
My final deliverables and research findings were used to guide the team on longer term projects after my internship ending. But, I still had some short term wins over my 3 months:
↑ INcrease UX QUALITY
6 UX Bugs submitted and picked up by engineering
↑ TASK COMPLETION
100% task completion for employers to complete 2 critical tasks
Or skip to the next project: Microsoft Account.
Before designing an arbitrary solution for a problem I didn’t know about, I dove deep into the existing system and past research.
I went through our product in QA and decided to conduct an audit to familiarize myself with areas we owned, identify discrepancies, and find opportunities for improvement.
AUDIT RESULT
6 UX Quality tickets filed to engineering, improved UI inconsistencies
AUDIT FINDING #1
There are 15+ actions on the dashboard; it's overcomplicated for users that post less jobs
AUDIT FINDING #2
Alerts constantly encourage action, but there's no hierarchy so users don't know how to prioritize
At this point, I touched base with my Senior UX Designer and Product Manager.
I prioritized finding #1 (simplifying dashboard) because this better aligned with long term company initatives.
Before I could “simplify” an experience, I needed to visualize the full complexity with a journey map. Our team had an outdated journey map, but the problem was it assumed the same journey for all types of users and treated it like a linear process (which it was not).
I thought of our product goal to simplify the experience and decided to minimize actions on dashboard job cards. This would not change any of the functionality since these actions could be accessed within the job details page.
The new solution simplified the dashboard tremendously, making it easier for SMB employers to manage their jobs.
To validate my designs, I worked with our UX Researcher to conduct usability testing with 7 SMB employers.
USABILITY
100% task completion rate for finding all candidates
USABILITY
100% task completion rate for closing and pausing jobs
PREFERENCE
6/7 particiants preferred the simplified dashboard
How to deal with vague problems
Going from polished college problem statements to this was a wake up call. Sometimes you don’t know what you’re solving until you start solving it. I learned to dig into data, be curious, and ask many questions.
How to think long term
Good design takes time, even if you don’t see it right away. I learned to ask questions like "what will the next few quarters look like with or without this design? What about years?"