Role:
UX
UI
Tools:
Figma
Notion
Procreate
Illustrator
INTRODUCTION
GradLaunch
Making Applying, Simple.
A platform that focuses on guiding graduates to obtaining jobs in their respected industry through workplace professionals.
What to Expect
Interview Findings
Personas
Competitive Analysis
Wireframes
Screen Content
Final Design
HMW's
User Flow
The Job Applying Experience (It's not Great…)
We’ve all been there, put in over 100 job applications only to get an interview back from one, and the interview is being conducted by an AI Chatbot. Not fun. We can go on and on about some of the issues when applying to jobs, but the main problems we’ll be tackling today is:
1
How can users view the hiring process to see if they’ll be hired after their interview?
2
How can we help users build a community within and outside work with other grads?
3
How can we hold interviewers accountable and provide feedback on why they
weren't hired?
The Solution
To help users have more control when applying for jobs and
have a community to lean on, I created a desktop application
to ease the process of applying to jobs while helping users
track their interview results and build a community with
like-minded individuals.
View Hi-Fi Prototype
Project Timeline
A quick summary and separation of what the case study has to offer.
01. Discovery
Establish the target audience
Learn about the competitors
Interview potential candidates
Compile interview results
DISCOVERY
Who Are We Trying to Help?
When researching who my audience is, it became clear that main category of users that’ll I’d end up designing
and solving this problem for were:
Soon to be or recent graduates, those who may be either graduating from colleges, certifications, or trade schools
Age between 16-40yo, many of the complaints I’ve heard, seen, and researched have been the younger generations.
Those living in the United States of America, since this is the area I’m most familiar with.
Current Competitors
After building up a basic understanding of the job market and applying process, I researched and analyzed three different competitors doing things similar to my project, those three being College Recruiter, WayUp, and Handshake. When analyzing their sites, I wanted
to keep in mind three things:
What do users like about them? Their features, looks, design, functionality etc...
What are users actively complaining
about when applying for jobs and the
hiring process?
What can we use from them that might help my own endeavors? Their information layout, design etc...
Once the questions were established and had a basic foundation, the next step was to gather data and research the competitors to see what information we can learn from them. Below are some snippets of the competitors site along with notes of user pain points and thoughts about each site.
Pain Points
- Jobs are posted even though they aren’t available
- Lack of transparency and
legitimacy of employers
- Unrelated job postings
for users
WayUp, has features such as offering users advice and guidance in the form of articles as well as having events that caught my attention. Kept in mind how they organized their jobs in a card format, but the job description section itself looks rushed, a wall of text as if your reading an article, something I wanted to try and avoid.
Pain Points
- Specifically only for
university/college students
- Job legitimacy
- Less focus on Non-traditional jobs, caters towards corporate jobs
- Filters jobs by majors
HandShake, a platform allowing those in college a more catered experience for job hunting, using your major as a means of finding jobs. In terms of design and layout, it again follows a card layout. The colors helped the site stand out, I feel it's something that can be implemented into my design.
Pain Points
- Irrelevant job options
- Employers not responding
to users after
- Lack of customization for job preference and/or
job alerts
- Lack of good quality jobs
College Recruiter, offers podcasts, videos and articles to user for advice on landing a job and also subjects such as the job market and the skills needed to succeed. Found that they have some accessibility issues with the color and text overlapping it, along with image quality. Clicking "view more" on a job description takes you to a new page with the information which isn't ideal. Gives off a old feeling to it that I want to avoid.
After researching and understanding users perspectives and issues with job applications, I noted three main issues:
Lack of ways to communicate with employers, and not knowing how their application process is going.
Lack of quality job postings,
some job applications being fake, unrelated to what the user is doing, or not available.
Lack of customization, being able to customize job recommendations or profile to get the jobs and alerts you want/need.
Tackling Interviews
Now that there's a solid idea and direction of what needs to happen, I moved on to curating questions and interviewing 5 users, 2 who are attending a university, 1 who dropped out, and 2 who are taking/did certifications instead of school. The general main idea of the
questions I asked was:
Their Goals
Whether it be applying, posting etc.
Time Spent
How often/long do they
job hunt for?
Their Frustrations
Applying, posting, navigating websites.
What Do They Suggest?
What do they think would improve current problems?
Interview Findings
From the interviews, we found that:
When users were asked what they would want/do to make their experience better when applying, multiple participants
mentioned the same three things:
1
Wanting to be able to see where recruiters are in the hiring process.
2
Some way to tag different jobs with descriptions so other users are aware of what to expect.
3
Ways to easily talk to industry professionals about help with resumes or mockup interviews.
DEFINE
Personas
Once we established and better understood our users and their pain points, I then created some personas to really narrow down and understand our audience’s needs. With one persona focusing on the social and legitimacy aspect and the other the hiring process.
How Might We...
Once a solid foundation of user pain points and issues for many users was established, I began to iterate ideas and concepts on focusing on what problems to solve and how to tackle them.
User Flow
After settling on some ideas and concepts to build around, I started focusing on creating a user flow that wouldn’t waste users time while also ensuring personalization related to their goals.
ITERATE
Content Definition
Now that the bases of a user flow and how the ways they’d be able to navigate was created, I focused on establishing
the content that would be within each screen from buttons pressed to different sections and what information
and images they’d have.
Wireframes
When sketching the wireframes, the focus shifted to designing a flow that ensures users can easily see and
know what to interact with and that promotes them to explore the features available to them.
The Sign Up Process
Allows users to input their college degrees, certifications and persona
info like hobbies, and communities they'd want to be in to best customize
their experience.
Tracking Your Application
Designed to make users not waste their time waiting for a email back, users can now track where employers are in the hiring process so users can make informed decisions on next steps.
Community
A design that allowed users to filter out communities they wanted and be able to join any community. Community involved descriptions and rules beforehand so users know what they're getting into.
Graduate Aid
A educational space for users to learn
of upcoming jobs or careers as well
as giving users help from industry professionals to aid them in landing a job.
The Solution
Final Prototype: GradLaunch
Lets do a quick recap of how we got here:
The Goal
Improve users experience when applying for jobs and help build a community.
Sign Up
Allows users to choose their ideal job and major beforehand to narrow down potential jobs while also giving users the chance to input their own personal interests to set up their account.
Application Tracker
Allows users to track the jobs they've applied to as well as showing how long its been since the user applied. A tracker shows what stage the employer is at throughout the process and gives the user the option of adding descriptors of the job for others to reference.
Community Flow
Features filtering options to find a community that fits the user and description of the community itself, including the rules, leaders of the community, and what to expect
before joining.
Graduate Aid
Offers an array of resources to users to learn and better their own skills through the use of videos, articles, and workshops. Also allows users to set up mock interviews to practice with industry professionals.
Reflections and Next Steps
This project is one of my first projects and case study I created when I began learning about UX design and I'm over joyed at how this came out! Being able to create a project based off of people’s complaints and having those same people test and like it wishing it was a real thing is a nice feeling, knowing that what I do can potentially impact people when I get on projects that’ll have an
real life affect on people.
Though I’m truly happy how this turned out, I already see multiple aspects that can be worked on, and will tackle
in the coming days, such as:
1
Tweaking the color scheme to convey professionalism but excitement.
2
Creating more interactions for the user rather than it being more of a proof of concept.
3
Organizing information in a way that's interesting and functional for the user.
Check out my other works!
HalfNote
SparkFit (Coming Soon!)