Representative Event Registration
My Role
Lead UI/UX designer
Tools
Miro, Figma, Gitlab
Design Approach
Lean UX
Timeline
1.5 months ( May 2021 - July 2022)
INTRODUCTION
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.
“The representative event registration is one of the most critical aspects of their user experience journey. It is the initial encounter that a representative has with our product. The way it is designed can have a major impact on how representative users will be successful using our product.”- Michael Oelbaum, Founder and CEO
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.
OUR TEAM
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.
CHALLENGES
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:
Ease and Seamless Registration Process
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.
Increase Number of Employers Who Upload Information
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.
Prevent representatives from the same company from registering as separate entities
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.
Understanding Representatives as a user
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:
- Usually between the generations of baby boomers and millennials (average age of an employer representative is 41 years old) https://www.zippia.com/recruiter-jobs/demographics/
- Tend to struggle with technology and new software
- Understand better when they are walked through the process
- Used to attending in-person events that do not collect registrations
- Usually have different roles, some are responsible for registering, others are responsible for posting jobs for their organization, etc.
We used personas constantly throughout the project to guide design decisions, priorities, and create empathy amongst the representatives and our team.
DESIGN REQUIREMENTS
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.
Business Main Requirements
- Forms must be accessible to accommodate WCAG compliance
- Handle high volume of registrations
- Lower the number of representative support inquiries coming from registration
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.
Host Main Requirements
- Access the event representative registrations
- Ability to select registration questions
- Control over the registration access/privacy to control which employers and job seekers were admitted to the event
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.
APPLIED SOLUTIONS
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.
In order to solve the top key problems of the representative registration:
Ease and Seamless Registration Process
Multi-Step Form & Progress Indicators
Automation
Provide instant input validation/error message handling
Increase Number of Employers Who Upload Information
Category/Grouping of information
Friction-based Signup
Improving the Interface Design
Prevent representatives from the same company from registering as separate entities
Email Domain Validation
Invite Colleagues Section
User Flow and Field Interactions
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.
Usability Testing
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.
Most valuable results from this project
- Increased employer content uploaded to 70%
- Decreased representative support requests relating to registration by 85%
- Increased host customer satisfaction by 100%
Conclusion/Outcomes
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.