Role
User Experience
Visual Design
Prototyping
A smarter way to navigate the tech job market.
Collaborators
Cole Andrews
Judson Lowe
Scott Rzasa
Henry Verill
Tools
Figma
Asana
MS Teams
Duration
7 weeks
Executive Summary
The competitive tech job market makes it difficult for professionals to land roles at top companies. Despite numerous resources, navigating the hiring process remains a challenge. Hirescape, a specialized job search platform designed specifically for the tech industry, connects skilled professionals with the right opportunities, simplifying the path to employment. Our key objectives are to:
- Help users find their ideal job by streamlining the search process.
- Better match candidates’ skills and experience with relevant opportunities.
- Provide a feedback system to enhance user experience and career growth.
Introduction
Hirescape simplifies the tech hiring process, connecting professionals with relevant opportunities in a competitive and ever-changing industry. This study highlights Hirescape's intuitive design and functionality, from its user interface to its job-matching system. A modern color palette, clean typography, and structured layout create a professional and engaging user experience focused on clarity, accessibility, and efficiency.
Process
The Lean UX process emphasizes iterative development and continuous feedback, allowing us to adapt and refine Hirescape based on real user insights. We began with the Lean UX Canvas to define our assumptions and prioritize what needed to be built and tested. This led to rapid prototyping and user testing in short sprints. Each sprint involved designing, building, and testing specific features, allowing us to validate our hypotheses and quickly iterate on the design. This cyclical process of building, measuring, and learning ensured that Hirescape evolved to meet user needs effectively.
The Canvas
Using the Lean UX Canvas, we aligned on project goals, user needs, and key assumptions. This streamlined our design process, guiding how we defined problems, formed hypotheses, and validated our approach, ensuring a user-focused product.
Business Problems
Hirescape was created to address shortcomings in existing job search platforms. We identified two key issues: First, many platforms charge posting fees, excluding smaller and mid-sized companies. Second, consistent resume uploading is often cumbersome for job seekers.
To address these issues, we prioritized a user-friendly experience with an intuitive interface and comprehensive filtering options, allowing job seekers to refine their search by company size, function, salary, and more.
Business Outcomes
In order to gauge the success of our product we decided upon two variables that would be the main indicators.
Jobs are filled and Customer Retention From these we were able to frame out the paths user would ideally need to take to reach these desired end goals.
Sprint 1 Business Outcomes
Sprint 2 Business Outcomes
Users
For our first sprint, we developed two proto-personas representing key user types: a recent graduate and a career changer transitioning into tech.
In sprint two, we focused solely on the recent graduate proto-persona, removing the career changer persona from consideration.
User Outcomes and Benefits
We considered user needs and the benefits of using Hirescape, along with the desired behavioral changes indicating goal achievement. We hypothesized that users value efficient job searching and information gathering. While user inactivity could indicate product failure, we also recognized that it could signal successful job placement.
Solutions
We created an affinity map based on potential design solutions that would address our proto-personas' needs and desired outcomes. This process allowed us to categorize our findings into four key areas.
Moving into sprint two, these key areas evolved, reflecting a refined understanding of actual user needs and wants.
Hypotheses
We synthesized our previous assumptions into unified statements and categorized them based on priority: build, test, no test needed, and discard.
After categorizing our hypotheses, we prioritized them based on risk, identifying the ATS resume checker as the highest-risk element.
MVPs and Experiments
We defined the designs needed to test each hypothesis. These hypotheses were then placed in a product backlog and subsequently moved into sprint backlogs, outlining the deliverables for each sprint.
Sprint 1 MVPs
Sprint 2 MVPs
Between sprints, new hypotheses were introduced, while others were validated or discarded.
Product Backlog
Sprint 1 Backlog
Product Backlog
Sprint 2 Backlog
The Design
With the Lean UX Canvas complete, we began the design phase. Our initial focus was establishing Hirescape's brand identity, including color palette, typography, icons, and other UI elements.
Style Guide
Components
We then began developing the core components that would be used throughout the Hirescape design.
Prototype
Next, we assembled these components to create the various pages for the Hirescape platform.
Home
Home Page
Search Page
Job Role Description Page
Guides
Article Page
Guide Page
ATS
Signed In Page
ATS Landing Page
Resume Feedback Page
Company
Company Search Page
Company Description Page
Company About Page
Conclution
Using Lean UX presented a significant learning curve compared to previous goal-directed design approaches. While challenges arose, as they do in any project, our team persevered and adapted, ultimately delivering a product that achieved many of our initial goals.
With additional time or a second iteration, I would prioritize rapid content generation early in the process to gather feedback and iterate more effectively. We may have spent too long perfecting certain aspects initially, which is counter to the Lean UX philosophy.
This project demanded significant time and effort, comparable to a full-time commitment, but it ultimately strengthened our design skills and refined our approach.