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Human Resources
Tech in Japan
Loyalty to one's company in Japanese culture is paramount. With the current shortage of skilled workers in tech, can we create products more suitable for young people that are more comfortable with the imminent changes of the next decade?
Design Lead - UX Research - UX Design - Team Lead - Branding
Context
Identity is a well known established company in the HR market. In 2018 they created a new family of products called Techcareer. There are a variety of products, going from apps to software to web services.
In this case study, I will present one of the early projects I was in charge of - the A.I. Job Board Platform. Basically, an online tech-related job hunting website for engineers and creators looking for a change in their career.
Challenge
There were many issues encountered when speaking with the main stakeholders within the company.
They felt they had built this great AI matching system behind it and no one was giving much attention to it. There was also the need to have a more “international vibe” to the platform since we were now expanding to other countries in Asia like Vietnam and China.
Overall, the product was out-performing and the company was still relying on the old fashioned agent team to get the job done and the company wanted TC to be more scalable and create a new process where hiring managers and candidates could be more independent from these intermediary figures.
Research
Quantitative
Regarding the data, we had an enormous bounce rate, low conversion rates, low search usage, very slow page loading speed. There were also some SEO issues, funnel issues.
Qualitative
Initially, we wanted to understand what the users were getting from the current version of the platform. We conducted a series of user interviews so we could address these issues one by one. The main ones are the following:
• Difficulty finding information
(information architecture issues)
• Slow page loading, search and page transitions
(performance issues)
• Dated layout, stiff
(design issues)
• Formal communication style
(ux writing, micro-copy issues)
• Not having a great mobile experience
(responsiveness issues)
Search Behavior
Secondly, I wanted to understand what was important in Job Hunting from the user perspective.
Here we had some interesting findings:
What is the most important thing when
looking for a new job in tech?
1- Salary
2- Position
3- Company Environment and Culture
4- Company size/name/fame/status
5- Location
We also performed behavioral research to understand how users were searching in these jobs. We did this via site analytics + user interviews.
What do you prioritize when searching for a new job on any platform?
1- Skills
2- Job Title
3- Company
4- Salary
5- Location
When these two are confronted, we see a big difference between what they are looking for and how they search for it. Even though the salary is an important aspect of the job, they were searching for jobs considering the skills they have, which makes a lot of sense because it doesn’t matter if that job has a huge salary if I don’t have what it takes to get it.
I was also curious about Company Environment and Culture since I was always exploring the cross-cultural differences between users from different backgrounds and have always found this fascinating! I also realized that we didn’t have this type of information on the Job Description page, but being the 3rd most important aspect of job hunting, it would be wise to include that.
We asked on interviews, what is important regarding Company Environment?
• Informal dress code
• Good bosses, no yelling
• Respectful colleagues, no bullying
• Good calm work environment
• Flexible hours
• Good hardware
(fast internet, 2 monitors, good chair...)
Regarding choosing a service to find a new job, we asked what was the most important aspects of a chosen service:
• Safety about the handling of personal info
• Simplified registration
• Good quality jobs/companies
• Updated jobs
• Easiness to use
Personas
Competitive Analysis
We did extensive research on competitors so we could understand the standards used by the major HR players in order to collect patterns and useful insights regarding job search. Most seemed to be very complex, filled with detailed information and still following old Japanese website models from the early ’90s. Most of them had a very “mendokusai” (overwhelming) registry process and were more interested in displaying quantity over the quality of information.
Wireframes
At this point, we felt we were ready to start putting down the info we collected and started connecting the pieces together so we could have a better idea of what we wanted to do with our product.
Prototyping
Prototyping was paramount especially for defining a better mobile experience since we had a complex search. It also helped us validate many aspects of the interface and list elements that were just polluting the page. Although, in Japanese digital culture, the trend is to include as much information as possible and there is a certain ambiguity regarding white space, so overall was important not only for the product itself, but also to boost my knowledge on the subject :)
Evidencing A.I.
In order to create more awareness around our Artificial Intelligence matching system, we created a few elements to help the user understand it. Beyond explanatory content, on static pages and news pages, we created an option for users to increase their matching by completing an optional more detailed form in their profile and encouraged them with notifications. When logged in, they could check the jobs more suitable to their profile by checking the labels on the jobs.
Final Designs
With inputs from both the marketing team and the sales team, we created the final version of the product but also created a few options for A/B testing purposes in order to minimize bounce and maximize conversion on the top page and landing pages. There are so many designs that are a bit hard to choose. Here is just a small collection of various layouts from different projects we created over the last year. These include websites, apps, landing pages, e-mails, presentations and offline media like posters, events materials, cards, t-shirts, mugs and so on and so forth...
Icons and Illustrations
