Aleksandar Medan

About The Job Sauce

The Job Sauce is a resume and career counseling service provider specializing in helping mid- through executive-level professionals land their dream jobs with significant raises. The company is currently looking to expand its resume writing service through the hiring of more writers.

USER RESEARCH

DATA SYNTHESIS

WIREFRAMING

PROTOTYPING

USABILITY TESTING

Duration

3 week sprint

Team

Aleksandar Medan (myself), Geri de los Santos, Olivia Liang

Role

Our team was made of 3 user experience designers, each of us tasked with equally sharing duties throughout the design process. As a team, our process covered the vast majority of the UX design process in order to address our client’s goals, including client and user research, contextual inquiry, research synthesizing, problem framing, and creating a digital solution to go along with usability testing.

The Challenge

The Job Sauce needed an onboarding redesign for their resume service in order to help increase the conversion rate from their landing page to their order page. They came to us so that they would be left in a great position to sell their career coaching program.

Current project scope

(Landing page / Checkout page / Order confirmation page / Questionnaire page / Appointment schedule page / Call confirmation page)

The Solution

No need to reinvent the wheel, use what works instead

Our client kickoff meeting left us with a clear scope of what needed to be tackled in the onboarding process, but not a whole lot on how to tackle it.

My group quickly realized through our contextual inquiry and usability testing that we shouldn’t focus on giving The Job Sauce a flashy and  high-concept experience design, but a tried and true design “backbone” that allows for good UX design principles to shine through, and helps the content sell their service.

Approach

Contextual Inquiry

We began our research by performing a contextual inquiry with the current Job Sauce website. All three of us in the group brought back our own observations, where we then white-boarded our findings based on what was and wasn’t working for each step of the onboarding process.

We then continued our research by conducting usability testing with the current website. We asked 6 participants who have never heard of The Job Sauce to complete the task of purchasing a resume package and scheduling an appointment.

As we observed users navigate their way through each step of the onboarding process, we identified multiple points of confusion and frustration. We took this feedback and mapped out a user journey map which allowed us to understand the key essence in the user’s interaction with the onboarding steps for the resume writing service.

As you can see below, we found that there were two areas to hone in on and add extra effort for. They were the landing page and the questionnaire page.

1. Why the landing page?

This is the user’s first real glimpse into The Job Sauce, and the step of the process with the most amount of content. Because the payment page followed this page, it was important to make the most of this opportunity to educate and sell the user on the resume packages The Job Sauce provides for purchase.

2. Why the questionnaire page?

This was an area where user’s felt overwhelmed and hesitant, due to the length of the process and the validity of some of the questions. This is also where The Job Sauce gets key information for their process in pairing a customer with a resume-writer.

Affinity Mapping

While we had key pages/steps of the onboarding process we wanted to focus on to go along with user feedback from usability testing, we still had large amounts of data that needed to be organized into groups through affinity mapping. This allowed us to hone in on key aspects that helped us find the main drivers for the negative user journey. Throughout the current onboarding system, the feelings of lost, being uninformed, and untrustworthy kept popping up. To solve for this, we set three deliverables that our solution had to convey.

Design

Diamonds form the ring

For each of the three deliverables our solution had to convey, we set about prioritizing which features and aspects we would tackle for the redesign, and then categorize them amongst showing logic, value, and credibility.

To tackle logic, we focused on things like rewriting the questionnaire for simplicity and key information only. For showing value, we gave the new user the ability to compare plans on what they provided amongst each other, and for showing credibility we provided content for the user on the entirety of the resume writing process and how it works.

Early Wireframes

High Fidelity Wireframe Deliverables

Interactive Prototype

In upper right corner where it says 100%, select -Width - Scale down to fit width-

Next Steps

Test and stay up to date

While our group was able to conduct some usability testing with our high fidelity mockups, it still wasn’t enough. Moving forward, our main focus should be to conduct even more usability testing, and then iterating further based on the feedback. Additionally, our client is currently going through a website redesign, so a redesign of our high fidelity wireframes should be done in order to better match the new Job Sauce visual identity.

What I learned

Rein it in before before forward

In the very beginning of our design sprint, our group was taking time trying to figure how to tackle our client’s “blue sky” design request. We came to the conclusion that we should quickly figure out what our client’s main issue is regarding their site, and work from there. By conducting a contextual inquiry and usability testing with the current site early in the process, we were able to realize the site needed a “good practice” type of solution, not a “blue sky” result. By keeping our client in the loop early on as to what our design philosophy would be moving forward, we were able to ensure that a smooth process took place.

I learned from this not to be afraid to stray away from what the client wants, as long as it was early on in the process and they were kept in the loop, and understood the reasoning behind all of what was being done. Before moving forward, one needs to be absolutely sure that the problem they are setting out to tackle is the right one. In our case, we were able to set our client up in a solid position content wise, and with good UX design principles in place. Moving forward, our client is now free to make radical design additions, thanks to the sturdy back bone of their site.