Sick and tired of onboarding endless job boards?
By: Madeleine Macgreevy
Tags: Ux Designer, UX Research, Figma, Ux Design Process, Product Design

The Client

PitchMe is a skills-based talent marketplace, founded by Dina Bayasanova.

They have re-imagined the conventional CV, introducing the SmartMe Profile: An anonymous professional profile that showcases candidates’ skillsets before their experience.

Once candidates have onboarded the site, they will have their SmartMe profile, and be anonymously matched to employers.

The Brief

PitchMe was seeking advice on how to improve the user journey so that registered candidates would fully complete their SmartPprofile.

They were open to recommendation on:

Making the onboarding journey more intuitive Improving the overall look of the profile page to increase engagement and retention rate.

The Team

We were a team of 4: Tashena, Katie, Raul and myself (Madeleine)

My Role

My role focused on: User interviews, usability tests, affinity mapping, journey mapping, persona creation, testing and iterating, UX writing, and client engagement.

Process

We used the double-diamond design process for this project, which is split into four phases: Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver.

The double-diamond

Before our client meeting with Dina, we carried out a heuristic evaluation of the site to familiarise ourselves with the landscape. We took note of areas to focus on:

The use of terminology was confusing and unfamiliar eg. Neo CV

Icons looked greyed out

Page layout looked strange and confusing

We didn’t go into too much into depth here, since we needed insights from the user to direct us.

Survey

Dina had told us in the client meeting that we, as GA students, epitomised her target users: students and career changers searching for their dream job. Therefore, our classmates were the ideal candidates for our user research.

However, to extend our research beyond the GA cohort, we created a screener survey on Google forms to collate some expansive quantitative data that would filter out PitchMe’s target users.

Our survey received 59 responses from people aged between 18 and 35:

Screener Survey Findings

Usability Tests

We invited 8 of these participants to take part in a usability test of PitchMe’s existing onboarding journey. The goal of this was to uncover possible causes for the potential drop-off of registered users.

We started the users off on the homepage with a contextual scenario:

“Imagine you are a job seeker and using PitchMe to help you. Where would you go from here?”

Homepage:

Most users clicked straight to Find a job to begin onboarding. This meant they probably began their onboarding journey with no understanding of what SmartMe Profile meant, or what value it had.

Only a minority of users scrolled down to read the information below the fold, and they found an informative video explaining the terminology and the benefits of a SmartMe profile.

Some additional discoveries from the user tests that would later inform our design included:

Onboarding:

Users had a hard time recognising the greyed-out social account icons.

They didn’t understand the value of connecting these accounts

of connecting these accounts The page layout was considered confusing, the progress bar on the right was either overlooked or only spotted towards the end of the journey.

Competitive Analysis

Following the research, we did some competitive analysis to see if and how other recruitment companies were solving these issues. We focused on 5 main companies:

5 companies for competitive Analysis

We each journeyed through the onboarding process of a competitor, and then consolidated our notes.

Competitor insights

The key insights that inspired areas of opportunity for PitchMe were:

Data Transparency: All sites clearly communicated the value of the candidates’ data, and how they use it.

All sites clearly communicated the of the candidates’ data, and how they use it. Page Simplicity: Simple, easy-to-follow layouts with just one column to focus the user’s view. The progress bar at the top.

User Interviews

We then carried out semi-scripted interviews with 8 other users from the pool of survey participants. The purpose of this was to gain some qualitative data around their thoughts on the job application process.