Employo: Reducing profile completion time by 20%
Background
Connecting students with opportunities
Employo, an online job marketplace, targets university students seeking internship opportunities. Through aggregating internship and co-op job postings from across the web, Employo aims to be a marketplace for hiring university students across all roles, industries, and geographies.
From its inception, the Employo anticipated the product’s user experience to evolve and improve to better serve its purpose to users. Student users have access to a curated list of opportunities across Canada, saving them time and boosting overall student engagement.
Developers: Charlie Lin, Brad Huang, and Bijan Mirshahi
Designers: Myself
This project is ongoing starting in July 2018.
Problem
The site's data revealed that new visitors were leaving without completing a profile. The low conversion rate was attributed to the confusion surrounding the sign-up process.
Goal
Increase candidate profile completion by optimizing the sign-up process.
Research
Competitive/Comparative Analysis
I completed the sign-up process for three other job-search platforms that had services features catered to students. Undergoing each respective registration process helped compare positive and negative aspects, as well as points that caused confusion or hesitation. Noticeable features that made the process smoother were the addition of progress indicators, visual hierarchies with logical actions, and the ability to skip steps.
Heuristics Analysis
One way I qualitatively evaluated the registration experience was through using Jakob Nielsen's Heuristics Evaluation to identify and rank usability issues. In evaluating the current registration form with the heuristics, I gained a better understanding of where users were facing obstacles that impeded them from successfully registering a profile with Employo.
Usability Testing
After my own analysis, I conducted six rounds of usability testing with subjects who have used job-search platforms in the past. Testing was conducted in-person where I gave the users the task of completing a registration form and asked them to think aloud as they completed the process.
Using the previous heuristic analysis and the results from the usability testing, four areas of the most frequently encountered problems were revealed in the current flow. Many of the issues identified overlapped with the users’ comments during testing.
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Features and points to consider when designing:
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Sections and Hierarchy
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Divide up the form into separate sections to create a better structured form that ensures smoother completion experience
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Tracking Progress
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Include a progress bar that informs the user of their form completion and incentivize them to continue finishing the form
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Technical vs Non-Technical
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Build out the form’s structure to ensure it supports students from both technical and non-technical backgrounds
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Minimalism
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Revise the style guide for this form
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Designing a Solution
Atomic Design
This project was challenging because of the expansion of the registration form into separate sections. I wanted to ensure that I was designing with consistency in mind for the increased number of forms and user inputs. Using the atomic design methodology, I started designing the smallest elements, such as form fields for different input types. From there, I began to build out the other interaction types such as drop-down menus, search functions, and more.
Style Guide
Carrying on from the atomic design, I developed a style guide to establish a consistent visual hierarchy for easier navigation. Keeping the blue of Employo’s branding, I altered the hue to avoid it from being too flat. Keeping in mind the student-user, I still wanted the component styles to communicate reliability. Averta was a versatile sans-serif typeface with rounder letters to convey a dialogue of friendliness as users completed the form.
High-Fidelity Mock Ups
