Lead UI/UX designer
Miro, Figma, Gitlab
Lean UX
1.5 months ( May 2021 - July 2022)
Jobs Connected is a cutting-edge platform for managing events that focuses on arranging job fairs in various formats such as in-person, hybrid, and virtual, catering to different organizations like career centers, workforce development agencies, and school districts. Our platform is designed to be easy to use, allowing our clients to create, register and host job fairs without any hassle.
One of the main features that we focused on at Jobs Connected was the representative event registration. Representatives need to register to gain access to the event. We made our job fair registration tailored to our representative users by providing an easier sign-up process, grouping of registration questions in a logical order and a stronger content hierarchy. By completely updating the way our representative users register for a job fair, this project resulted in an immediate doubling of event representative participants, providing more insight for event hosts, less customer support inquiries, customizability for hosts and positively impacted job fair outcomes, such as representative attendance.
Product Designer (me)
Front End Developer (1)
Back End Developers (2)
Customer Support Representatives
CEO and Founder
What process our team used? To maximize the efficiency of our project initiative, we decided to implement a Lean UX approach, which involved rapid sketching, frequent meetings, continuous user feedback integration, and designing mockups. This approach facilitated early team alignment and generated a wealth of innovative ideas. As a small team, we understand the importance of streamlining our processes and delivering a high-quality feature on time. By leveraging this methodology, our goal was to optimize our workflow and ensure that our service surpasses our customers' expectations.
At the most fundamental level, Jobs Connected success is dependent on how successful the event host is able to hold a job fair. A greater number of employer registrants usually correlates with a more successful event as the chances increase that employers will fill the positions they are looking for and that job seekers will land a position. However, ensuring that hosts achieve their target numbers of registrations isn't quite as simple as just sending job fair invites and collecting event registration data. We needed to take a deeper look at our product and redesign to make some improvements to the representatives' event registration process.We identified top key problems and priorities related to how our customers were collecting their representative job fair registration such as:
We heard requests and complaints from representative users that they find the registration process to be disorganized and not straightforward which impacted them from not being able to successfully register for the event. In order to not frustrate our representative users we needed to make sure that when they register for an event, it is an easy and seamless process while still making sure that the hosts are able to collect the important data they need from representatives.
The platform was designed to encourage employers to upload information about their organization for job seekers to view, including videos, photos, and brochures as well as job postings in the registration. We tried to encourage employers to upload this information because employers with this information usually attract more job seekers during the event. However, some employers did not take the time to do this, even though it would help them. Our data showed that only 35-45% of employers had been uploading content. Current and prospective customers explained that the employers’ success was a component of their success as employers that were unsuccessful in filling positions were unlikely to attend another one of their events.
Often, representatives would register for an event and not tell their colleagues that they registered. The result was that their colleagues would also register for the event as a separate entity. This would result in representatives from the same organization creating multiple booths for their organization, even though they wanted to attend the event together and share a booth page. This would confuse the host who would think these multiple registrations from the same organization were representatives from different organizations and job seekers viewing these duplicated booths.
We conducted research about the types of representatives who attend our job fairs to learn about their challenges and pain points. In order to better understand the reasoning behind the behavior and requests we were seeing, the stakeholders and I partnered with our support staff to find customers who were good candidates for user interviews and practice sessions. Through these conversations we discovered that representatives are:
We used personas constantly throughout the project to guide design decisions, priorities, and create empathy amongst the representatives and our team.
After looking at the problems and customer motivations, we laid out some specific requirements for a new process and unified our event registration architecture. We also talked to our stakeholders to ensure we are meeting our business needs.
We made sure that the redesign would address issues that were more likely to occur with larger events as these types were both more lucrative and resulted in a greater number of support inquiries.
Who are the hosts? Host users are the ones who coordinate job fairs and purchase our platform to manage the events. Thus, it is important that we address issues relating to employer registration while making sure that the hosts' needs are met.
After considering our findings regarding representatives, our team met to discuss how we are going to provide a solution that will benefit the representatives. We needed to make sure that each part of the registration process made sense to the user.
We used a multi-step form and progress indicators to reduce cognitive load and appear to be less work. This was particularly important as the registration form expanded since the previous iteration of the site with additional steps, such as the ability to invite colleagues to the representatives’ account. The multi-step form and indicators made it clearer to the user where they were in the registration process so that they would not accidentally leave the registration prematurely. It also makes the process more manageable and motivates users to fill the progress bar so that they are more likely to complete the entire process. By utilizing a multi-step form, we can conveniently group questions fields into specific categories on separate pages, allowing for a more organized and manageable presentation of information without overwhelming the user with an excessive number of pages.
We needed to make it easier for users to fill out the registration form.We determined that adding a list of predefined selections for employers when creating their account would lead to faster account creation and more unified data.We also added the ability for users to reuse or “copy” data from previous events. This way, employers wouldn’t have to upload information from the company again, which could become quite onerous if they uploaded many types of information (many job postings, photos, brochures, etc.).
We aimed to make fields more clearly indicate any error messages.We received feedback that a “*” to indicate a field was required was not enough and that the form line should become red if not filled out. We changed the order to required items first, followed by optional items. For the booth page, the booth name is the only required item and at the top, followed by optional information about their organization, and finally the button to proceed to the next part of the registration. Representatives can skip over the other information by leaving it blank in case they don’t have time to upload then or are not the correct person, but at least see that this is information that should be included at some point before they see the button to proceed to the next part of the form. We also aimed to make better use of placeholders to better guide users as to what to input. For entering videos, we indicated in the prompt to add YouTube URLs only and in the placeholder to press “enter” to add additional YouTube URLs. When possible, we avoided waiting for the user to submit the form to report validation errors and had clear pop ups that said if the form submission was successful or had errors.
To ensure that we gather the most important information from employers, we prioritized and categorized the representative information. We requested the highest priority information first, starting with the booth information, which is crucial for job seekers to understand the company's offerings. Next, we requested job postings. We placed the option to add colleagues towards the end of the form because, even though this feature improves the experience for representatives and their team, it doesn't directly contribute to obtaining more information for their booth page. However, this placement serves as a reminder for representatives to share the responsibility of filling out the necessary information with their colleagues. Even if the representative filling out the form is not responsible for adding information, they will still see that their organization needs to fill out the information and will be more likely to encourage their colleagues to do so. This way, we ensure that we collect the necessary information for job seekers and enable the representatives to collaborate effectively.
After careful consideration, we determined that a friction-based sign-up process would be the best approach for our needs, even though it would require slightly more effort from the users. By doing so, we aimed to increase the likelihood that representatives would complete all required fields, which would provide greater value for both the representatives themselves and job seekers who accessed the uploaded information. While we understood that this approach might result in some users abandoning the form, we were confident that our specific use case would mitigate this risk. Specifically, the representatives using the form were already committed to attending the event, which meant they would likely be more willing to invest time and effort into the sign-up process. We also designed the form to guide users through each section and encourage them to complete all fields, without making any information mandatory that users strongly objected to providing. Overall, we believed that this approach struck the right balance between gathering comprehensive information and avoiding overly burdensome requirements for users. By providing clear guidance and emphasizing the value of completing the form, we were able to maximize the number of representative registrations while minimizing the risk of user frustration or abandonment.
Our previous registration form did not have unified elements and led to a duller user interface. We used newer design frameworks to make the form look more appealing. Our testers provided feedback that this helped make the process feel less tedious and encouraged them to fill out more of the information asked. Our team highly considered building trust with our users and making the design look professional such as making more use of the color blue as our research indicated it represented trust for users. This resulted in making our site look reliable and trustworthy so that our users would not second guess if they can provide us with their information.
We added a dropdown list of organizations in the platform. This way, representatives could check if their organization or department within their organization was already registered on the platform. If it was on the list, they could join their organization and, if they tried to register, the platform would prompt them that their organization had already created a booth at the event.
When registering, representatives could invite colleagues to join their organization’s booth at the event. This would ensure that these colleagues joined the same booth, eliminate the need for them to register, and encourage communication between colleagues about registering.
Our team has observed that the previous representative registration process for the Jobs Connected platform was not ideal. After analyzing the old registration flow, we realized that it was restrictive and not user-friendly. Therefore, we took the initiative to revamp the process and create a new user flow that is more intuitive, streamlined, and logical. Our goal was to ensure that the new representative registration process would provide users with a seamless experience from start to finish.
While the user flow diagram is helpful for understanding the general user journey, it's also important to dive deeper into the details of how individual elements will work. That's why I go beyond the user flow diagram to create a more detailed document that outlines the specific interactions and functions of each field. This level of detail helps our team to fully grasp the user experience and make informed decisions on how to provide better registration experience.
Throughout the development of the new representative registration form, we performed testing after every milestone was achieved. Our testing process involved examining and evaluating each field's functionality and interactions, providing valuable feedback to refine the form continuously. By applying this approach to our testing methodology, we aimed to ensure that the representative registration form is user-friendly, efficient, and meets achieving our user goals.
It may seem harder to design something complex, but I have found that it is actually harder to take a design and make it simpler. In many cases, the users find a design difficult to understand and use in ways that a designer doesn’t anticipate, making it challenging to understand why the users find the design confusing. If the design already appears simple to the designers, it can be challenging to find ways to simplify it further. Additionally, users may find the same design confusing for different reasons, meaning that it can be a challenge to improve the design so that it addresses all user feedback.
The goal here was for registration to be so easy that it was second nature for users and they would not even remember they did it. Short forms perform better than long forms, but with the kind of product we offer, it is challenging to keep the onboarding process brief and simple since we have challenges and limits that we must consider. Applying the principles of form design is not always a literal application of these principles as one still needs to tailor the principles to users, product and business requirements.
It was important to avoid overwhelming users with irrelevant tasks. This helped me focus on grouping related question fields, prioritizing relevant questions and breaking steps apart so that users will have a better guide on how to answer the registration form. It also challenges me to empathize with the representative users and think of potential expected user behaviors. In this case, I understand and account for user behavior at each stage to ensure that users exhibited the desired behavior.
With this project I saw at firsthand that constantly testing assumptions and design iterations can lead to big increases in improvements over time. This experience provided a wealth of learning opportunities. I learned to be critical of my own design decisions and improved my ability to provide reasoning and justification for my design solutions. I finished the project with the conclusion that form optimization is not a one time event, it’s a never-ending learning process.