A journey redesigned and scaled.
The overall goal of scaling is to first NAIL IT, and then SCALE IT. Specially:
Conducted a heuristic evaluation of current experience and prioritised the issues to share with the cross-functional team
Together with the UX designer from the employer team, we conducted a heuristic evaluation to audit and assess the current state of job seekers’ experience. After the audit, I piled all the notes and prioritised the issues based on severity. I then socialised the findings with the PM and engineering teams to discuss how to implement the fixes that are part of broken experiences such as inconsistent messaging, accessibility and usability red flags.
Utilised a mix of research methods to understand user needs and did a deep dive with PM of our current funnel data.
While the engineering team is working on fixes, I carried out a round of discovery research to understand what are the outstanding pain points that job seekers are facing. The method I utilised:
A simple user journey to capture the research findings
Through the research, some outstanding user problems include:
Led a design workshop with cross-functional teams to map out user persona and JBTD
Now that I felt we have a good foundational research understanding of our job seekers, I piled the findings and shared them with the team. Then based on the findings, I led 2 group brainstorming sessions to map out our user persona and JBTD. The purpose of the sessions were to build team’s empathy towards our job seekers (as we were very employer focused prior), and to align on design strategy.
Mapped out the ideal user journey and what are the essential contexts we need to surface at each stage.
Based on the workshop and research findings, I started to think through what would be an ideal user journey and at each stage, what context we should provide job seekers so that they feel well-informed and prepared to complete the interview.
Conducted a round of research sessions where I co-designed with users.
Once I had the first round of concept drafts, I invited 6 job seekers who have never experienced one-way interviews for user studies. In each session, I asked them to help me put together pages/emails at each stage that would help them feel informed to evaluate if they want to take the interview and then feel prepared to start the interview. The user study activity brought up very engaging conversations as job seekers were actively thinking and tons of useful insights including their primary needs/questions, information architecture, and how they evaluate if to take the interview or not.
Conducted an audit across Indeed of interview messaging and user flows.
To ensure a consistent and connected experience (also to find future valuable integration points), I did an audit of current Indeed interview messaging and user flows. I then connected with relevant UX design teams outside Incubator to share our current state and what we are thinking to get their feedback.
Together with PM and Engineers, we stack ranked the experimentation priority.
At this stage, I felt I was in a good shape of design directions, so I started to have conversations with the PM and engineers to prioritise the core use cases and experimentation order for the upcoming roadmap.
A new post-interview survey to measure UX success and satisfaction baseline.
One of the goals was to increase value delivery and quality experience for job seekers, but I felt the current post-interview survey we had could not really help us to measure and understand if we are providing job seekers with the experience that can enable them to be successful in the interview. Hence, I modified the SuperQ model and proposed a new set of questions that can help us create a better baseline for job seeker satisfaction and UX quality. I socialised the list of questions with the PM and content designer, and also got feedback from quantitative researcher expertise within Indeed to ensure a survey that is both effective and aligned with team goals.
Utilised usertesting.com to conduct unmoderated usability testings.
Based on the experimentation priority, I started to work on detailed hi-fi designs for each epic and before each major experimentation release, I took action to conduct unmoderated usability testings.
We carried out a very iterative process with a 1-week sprint engineering cycle.
I worked very closely with the PM to track experiment results and bounce ideas on hypotheses. I also would go and launch rapid user studies as needed to understand why certain experiments performed that way. Then the PM and I would discuss and move around experimentation order based on hypothesis and user insights.
An example how we iterated the experience over the course based on experimentation results.
We added an intro page as a touchpoint to improve JS context. Then we added an option to start now instead of forcing job seekers to schedule a time to provide job seekers flexibility to choose their own journey and capture their interest at the moment which resulted in uplift in interview starts but -10% in Interview recording completion.
In order to address the false start , we added an initiative of abandon interview email which led to an option for job seekers to proactively save and exit interview as needed to address the false start.
Kudos from cross-fucntional team members.
Challenge - stay ahead of engineering curve: As the sole designer on the team, of which the engineering team is running 1-week sprints, so I had to adapt design working pace to ensure quality and timely design delivery.
Biggest take-away - what users say vs. what they do: This was a constant battle throughout the design journey where job seekers would say something during the interview that resulted in completely different data results. I started to frame interview questions differently, or be creative with research methods. Most importantly, a rapid user testing post-experimentation was my best friend to assess how user behaviours are tied with data analysis.
What’s next -value increase and vision+: Right before lay-off, I just completed a discovery research with the new flow with a focus of value increase and vision beyond single interview experience, aiming to find our next big opportunity.