The challenge
When I joined Vacancy Filler, I was briefed to propose short/long-term fixes to improve the software. The long-term fixes started with the redesign of Adverts screen which was the homepage. The Adverts screen is where recruitment officers would view and manage their advertised roles at different stages.
This 👇is how it used to work and look
The process
There weren’t many ‘issue raised by clients; so, the main sources for insight for problems were implementation team, training team, support team, and sales team. I conducted a heuristic evaluation as well to pinpoint some obvious issues.
Some of the problems
- Overload of information
- Extremely poor information architecture
- Not responsive
- Lack of visual cue for next actions
- Visually not appealing and out-dated
- Not remembering users input upon returning (e.g. filtering criteria)
- Partially clunky (performance issues)
Plan to solve the problems
- Short term plan to improve primary navigation bar
- Long term plan remove secondary navigation bar
- New responsive layout
- De-cluttering displayed info; allocating real estate according to importance
- Defining clear buttons for popular next steps
- Making it more human-like & less machine-like looking
- Avoiding a disruption in the user experience and user interface design as the redesign was meant to happen gradually - screen by screen and go well with the rest of the system which wasn’t revamped yet
The output
Started with sketches on paper (low fidelity prototype) to Balsamiq interactive prototypes. Followed by internal design review sessions after each iteration. After 3 major iterations, the final version was taken to high fidelity stage where UI was polished off.
Ideally, the iterations should have been done after user testing with customer. Instead, the solution was only tested internally by colleagues due to company’s low level of maturity in UX design. Then the new design was soft launched to asset impact and gradually was rolled out to 100% of customer base.
One for the future
I put an aspirational high-fidelity mock-up together to excite and encourage the product development team and the wide business to move forward.
The outcome
- Usage on mobile devices increased by 10% in the first 3 months. This was a great way to make the product more appealing for not only power users (HR team) but also for hiring managers. Satisfaction across the client's business had a positive impact on customer retention rate.
- Page loading time went down by 40%
- Broke down a mental barrier for many colleagues (especially those who were part of the company for a while) to accept change and consider this a cautious small step forward.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to measure the improvement in the usability of the product as my access to testing with our users was limited and the business didn't gather any analytics on the product. later on I introduced Google Analytics and Hotjar to the business.