Jobuilder
Overview
Team
Problem Statement
Solution
Jobuilder aims to assist international students who are currently recruiting and desire to simplify the process of managing visa applications, academic life, job searching, and preparing for job interviews at the same time. This digital system will integrate the information from third party job platforms and allow the user to track important dates and events through a career oriented calendar. Through this system, international students will be able to decrease their stress over job seeking and be more comfortable during the recruiting process.
Role
UX designer,
UX researcher
Date
Aug. 2021 - Dec. 2021
Chia Yu Hu
HyoJeong Kim
Joanne Tsao
As an international college student, the set of challenges faced are many, especially when it comes to the process of securing a job. Oftentimes, the search is accompanied by other factors such as upcoming visa deadlines, or a need to balance academic life while preparing for recruitment. This can create a toll on the student’s mental and physical state, making this period an overall stressful experience.
Process
Research
Generative User Interviews
Our team decided to conduct contextual interviews with individuals who were either undergraduate or graduate international students primarily from the University of Texas at Austin who were currently job hunting. We were able to contact a total of 18 people and schedule interviews with those who fit our criteria. In the end, we were able to interview a total of 6 participants who came from a variety of college majors.
Affinity Mapping + Insights
Through our interviews, we were able to identify key pain points and themes to drive future feature development. By taking our interview notes and categorizing them into 3 different main pain points, we were able to get a better big picture of the kinds of problems our platform should aim to solve.
Modeling
The mapping led to our team modeling the initial potential flow of our system to provide a visual overview of the functions of our platform and its relation to the user.
Hierarchical Task Inventory
To be able to further understand the key tasks and functions users should be able to perform on our site, we developed this visual diagram of the main and sub tasks that we would design for our platform. Initially we visualized our users wanting to have a main account, scheduling, and job recommendation function.
Ideation
Persona
Through our generative interviews, we are able to gather enough participant data to create a persona that united these common traits, behaviors, and goals.
Storyboard
To drive home the impact of our platform, I illustrated a storyboard over a potential user’s journey. The user is an international student in his final year of college. Before he graduates, he needs to finish his final exams and secure a job. The student is spending a lot of time looking for jobs across different job platforms and having trouble keeping track of all the jobs. The student is also seeing many of the same jobs on different job boards in his job searching. It is easy for the student to miss deadlines and events for academic and job related activities due to a disorganized calendar that is unable to properly display items based on need. The student hears about a new platform called Jobuilder which offers a planner specially designed to keep track of jobs and related events. The student tries out the platform and finds it very useful, successfully managing the many items on his calendar, passing his finals, and securing a full-time job offer.
Design
Wireframing
The skeleton of our prototype was created in Figma, built to show basic functions and features that our platform would be able to provide to international students. Along with a digital mockup, we also drew out a paper model so that we could get a feel for how the app would function under the direction of the user. Being able to map physical movement to actions occurring within the application provided an extra layer of dimension of how usable the basic frames were.
Low-Fidelity Prototype
Screens for our prototypes were built according to the common user tasks we believed a user would encounter:
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Signing up
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Job searching
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Networking
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Calendar scheduling
Signing Up
Job Searching
Networking
Calendar Scheduling
Testing
Usability Tests
To test the functions of our site, we reached out to 4 graduate students to give us feedback on certain user tasks:
Findings
From our usability tests, we uncovered areas where task flows could be improved and functions could be streamlined based on user feedback:
Final Prototype
After our usability tests, we decided to make changes according to feedback and decided to adjust the design of some pages accordingly and cut back on some functions so that we could focus on honing the intended core functions of our platform.
Signing Up
An integral part of the process of utilizing the platform, signing up and logging in allows for the site to keep things personalized for the user.
Job Searching
Users will be able to view jobs tailored to them, save jobs to their calendar, as well as save jobs to view at a later date.
Calendar Scheduling
Users will be able to keep track of important due dates related to job applications and job related events via the tracker. A visa tracker also serves as another feature meant to help students keep track of time left before expiration.
Takeaways
Through designing a job platform for international students, I learned more about identifying tasks and modeling in the design process. It also reminded me how important it is to understand how your design can compete with the other existing applications already on the market. There were many times during this process where we needed to sit back and think about how our platform could be differentiated from other job boards.
In designing an application from scratch, it can be easy to get excited and carried away about adding features. When user testing, our team realized that while users might find certains features useful, they did not necessarily think they would use it and would prefer to have more simplicity in the interface for ease of use. This led to us reprioritizing our main functions and cutting back on the networking ability we were originally going to implement in our application so that we would have more time to fully develop the other functions.
Next Steps
In the future, we may consider adding back the networking function and even additional features such as a resume template feature, or continue iterating upon the main functions already available on our platform so that users will be able to go through the most streamlined process possible. We also want to make sure that our platform follows accessibility guidelines so conducting accessibility assessments will be needed. As always, design is an iterative process and there are always ways to improve upon a design.