INTRODUCTION

Jobs Connected is an events management platform that focuses on hosting in person, hybrid and virtual job fairs for different types of organizations, such as career centers, workforce development, and school districts. Empowering them to host and create job fairs with ease, flexibility and focus on building connections with their audience.

I led the redesign and product overhaul for the Jobs Connected web and mobile web applications, established the product experience vision, and managed a cross functional team that executed a complete revamp of the product based on evolving customer needs. My work also extended beyond just design leadership as I made significant contributions to the overall product strategy while also maintaining business daily operations.

With the opportunity to redesign Jobs Connected products and services, it allowed me to learn and understand how to from engaging more with users, building a tech stack, establishing a design system, information architecture, prioritization, and shipping a product on scheduled time. Lastly, working on the redesign being exposed me to best practices that can strengthen product’s usability, accessibility, scalability, development and achieve business goals.

OUR TEAM

PROCESS

Overall, the process that we implement to achieve this project initiative is a mixture of Lean UX and Agile Methodology. We needed to take that approach because of our small team size, the big undertaking of service, and quick product delivery. Since we are a small team, how big of an undertaking to our service and to deliver a product as fast as possible.

THE CHALLENGE AND BIG DECISION

Our team decided that it was time to change the technology Jobs Connected was based upon. The technology originally used was chosen to get the product off the ground quickly and cost effectively, but led to issues with scaling and releasing new features, making it difficult to meet customer’s needs. We made a big decision to develop and redesign the Jobs Connected Platform from the ground up in order to fully pay our tech debt for greater sustainability and benefits long term.

EARLY STAGE OF PRODUCT STRATEGY

Jobs Connected had been in business since 2017, but the impetus for a platform overhaul was the Covid-19 pandemic. There was a huge need and demand for our product and service, since people could not host or attend in-person job fairs. (insert picture of a project timeline)We needed to carefully consider the execution and timeline for this project. Not only did we need to get the product ready for existing customers, we also needed to move quickly because competitors had already recognized the demand for our product and were beginning to copy our service. In addition, we needed to hire new talent and experienced developers to build a team capable of handling the project's scope.

Unlike our new competitors, we were not limited with our knowledge of the space and had experience hosting successful virtual job fairs. Our team was also very involved with current users and what they wanted and needed. Jobs Connected was one of the pioneers in specializing in the virtual job fair space.

Redesigning the user experience and structure of the Jobs Connected platform was not a challenge. However, our focus was on prioritizing the resolution of the pain points, goals, and needs that our users had experienced while utilizing the platform. We needed to maintain existing features and solutions that were effective in the previous version while enhancing them. Additionally, we aimed to innovate by introducing new features that would appeal to our users in the current competitive market. Lastly, we had to address the challenge of accomplishing all these requirements with a small development team.

REVALUTION AND RE UNDERSTANDING OUR PLATFORM USERS

In order to establish a solid foundation for this project, it was important for me to focus on advocating for and reintroducing our entire team to both our current and potential users. By doing so, we aimed to gain a better understanding of what was working and not working for our users, which would enable us to recreate a superior product. Broadly speaking, we identified three categories of users: attendees (students, job seekers), representatives (employers, recruiters), and hosts (organizations that host job fairs, including school districts, career centers, and workforce development organizations). This complexity in user types made the design process more intricate, and necessitated thorough research into each user group.

We conducted both qualitative and quantitative research to gather information about our users, utilizing various methods including:

• Support Requests: We analyzed support emails, which provided us with a wealth of information. This allowed us to quantify user experience pain points based on the number of support issues received.
• Training and Practice Sessions: During these sessions, we trained users on how to use the product, and observed in real-time where users had difficulty with the platform and where they were confused.
• Forums: We discovered that representative and host users frequently utilized several popular forums in their industries. By analyzing these forums, we were able to gain insights into how users felt about various products, their goals, and their challenges, which helped us design our platform to address these issues. We also read and researched content from subject matter experts in the field to gather additional knowledge.
• Surveys: We collected data from a subset of individuals using a well-defined set of inquiries with the aim of drawing conclusions about our service on a broader scale.

This resulted in a deep understanding of our users' touchpoints, tasks, insights, capabilities, expectations and evidence in order to distinguish between the needs and goals of our users. This also helped in establishing more meaningful meetings and discussions to have a clear vision to our product road map.

A highly effective method for providing our team with a comprehensive overview and a clear reminder of our user-centric approach in the holistic redesign of our product is to present them with our user journey map in a single frame. This map details the positive and negative experiences of job fair participants (attendees, representatives, and hosts) and their corresponding tasks, patterns, flow, and core usage before, during, and after the event. By using this approach, we are able to solidify our focus on the users and ensure that all team members have a shared understanding of their journey.

The impact of the journey map: The user journey map had a significant impact on our team. It clearly highlighted the inconsistencies and shortcomings in the design of the original Jobs Connected product. This provided our team with the ability to synthesize and focus on the necessary iterations for the current version, while also creating a vision for future ideal user flows. Additionally, the journey map facilitated a dialogue within our team, allowing us to establish a better design system for our users and reference it when developing new, impactful creative solutions. This has resulted in an ongoing conversation about how we can improve the user experience for our Jobs Connected product.

PRODUCT STRATEGY AND BUSINESS ALLIGNMENT

Prioritizing and listing all user requirements was crucial in developing impactful features that our tech team could work on to deliver results early, often, and continuously. Equally important was not overwhelming our current users with the integration of the new and improved version of the product. Yet, it was also important that the platform continue to operate for existing customers. To handle the transition to the newly redesigned platform without losing customers and while attracting new ones, I presented and evaluated different propositions with my team. We strategized on making the transition appealing and not intimidating for users, even those with less in-depth knowledge of why Jobs Connected needed the upgrade.

Our approach included:

• Creating a visualization that explains in simple terms how the Jobs Connected tool is used and how its various parts work together
• Providing a simple explanation for the different types of job fairs (in-person, hybrid, virtual), job fair formats (scheduled or walk-ins), job fair sizes (small, medium, large), and job fair privacy (public or private) to help show the different layers and extent of hosting a job fair
• Timing the product release during low season of our customers and setting clear timelines and milestones
• Offering tailored onboarding services and how to documentation with our help center
• Enhancing the current experience and discoverability of new features for users

By establishing these structures and creating a collaborative environment, we were able to have frequent alignment sessions to ensure that our redesign strategy was aligned with our business goal of not losing customers and attracting new ones. This approach allowed us to gain buy-in from stakeholders and invest in the redesign of the Jobs Connected product with confidence.

LEAN DESIGN VISION

Our team was excited about the potential of our ideal future state for the product, but we needed to be realistic about the resources we had available. With a small tech development team and high stakes, it was important to pivot our expectations and strategy to create a lean design vision that was practical and feasible. I introduced and explored design processes that aligned with lean product development principles. Our lean design vision became a guiding principle for product decision-making, allowing us to prioritize the most impactful features and solutions while still delivering results early, often, and continuously.

During the design process, I focused on the following key areas to ensure the success of the project:

• Synthesizing inputs: I spent time analyzing and consolidating all the feedback we received from our users, stakeholders, and team members. This helped us identify the essential features and functionalities that needed to be incorporated in the new design.
• Facilitating ideation sessions: I worked closely with our tech team to brainstorm and ideate on the best design system, toolset, architecture, tech stack, and product ecosystem for our platform. We collaborated to make informed decisions that would benefit our users and the company as a whole.
• Balancing conceptual vs. high-fidelity designs: I honed my ability to strike a balance between visualizing a simple conceptual experience and executing a high-fidelity prototype. This allowed us to iterate quickly and test our ideas in a fail-fast approach.
• Defining deliverables: I defined the deliverables that would best articulate each stage of the design process, ensuring that the team was aligned and knew what was expected of them.
• Communicating design decisions: I shared the resulting story of our fail-fast approach with stakeholders across the organization, emphasizing the need to support our design decisions in order to consistently improve the product experience. This helped us build continuous buy-in and support for the project.

PRODUCT COMPLIANCE PRIORITIZATION

While we were making great strides in developing our product, our leadership reminded us that as a SAAS third party vendor, we needed to ensure that our product followed industry guidelines, requirements, and compliance standards. Our customers, who primarily come from the K-12, higher education, private, and government sectors, place a high value on product accessibility and security. While it may be tempting to put this on the back burner and focus solely on shipping features and accelerating product development, it is essential to prioritize compliance. Many customers make purchasing decisions based on a vendor's ability to demonstrate proof of product accessibility, security, confidentiality, processing integrity, privacy, and risk management through testing, certification, and detailed reports.

To achieve this, we needed to educate ourselves on industry standards such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT), Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Tool (HECVAT), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and Service Organization Controls (SOC) reports. As a company, we needed to familiarize ourselves with these guidelines, review relevant documentation, and ensure that our product met these standards to provide the best protection and accessibility for our customers.

As the lead designer, I recognized the importance of complying with accessibility standards, security measures, data protection, and privacy controls to meet technical specifications. It was imperative for us to act on these requirements, not only to ensure customer satisfaction but also to fulfill customer purchasing requirements. To achieve this, we integrated accessibility and security measures into the core of the Jobs Connected product. This meant that compliance impacted almost every aspect of the product redesign, requiring significant time, effort, and resources. Working closely with our Founder and development team, we broke down the product vision into phased initiatives and requirements that allowed us to deliver a minimum viable product that still supported the new experience model. Throughout the process, we prioritized continuous feedback and improvements to ensure that we met all vendor requirements before launch.

DESIGN JOURNEY

I was responsible for delivering the entire design from start to finish, worked closely with the development team and the product’s entire ecosystem.

To accomplish this, I did the following:

• Found edge cases and workflows that needed to be solved and optimized
• Used a UI Component Framework that has a collection of pre-made components paired with powerful features such as dynamic themes, global defaults and application layouts
• Implemented accessibility and security compliance while not sacrificing user experience
• Designed screens to displayed API asset data to unify with our product’s design

Each individual component of the product needed to be tailored to its specific usage situation, while also being crafted to maintain a consistent and unified overall user experience.

How I facilitated a consistent END-TO-END experience:

• Created a schedule for regular design reviews with the team to foster critical thinking and constructive feedback
• Identified connections between various products and prompted the team to evaluate our approach to these connections
• Collaborated closely with developers and the founder to ensure consistent visual design across the user experience
• Defined design principles to guide the team's new design strategy
• Produced several user flow diagrams to demonstrate how users interacted with different parts of the ecosystem

CONCLUSION AND OUTCOMES

The redesigned Jobs Connected platform successfully addressed all our business challenges and boundaries, while meeting our customers' needs. Our efforts resulted in significant improvements, including a

• 70% decrease in our team's workload.
• 100% customer satisfaction, and a tripling of user capacity
• 65-75% increase in adoption rate per product release.

I am incredibly proud of the team I worked with on this project. It took long hours of meetings, ideation, prioritization, continuous iteration, feedback, and hard work to release our minimum viable products, launch features, and implement products. Through our collaborative efforts, we were able to develop a comprehensive and effective solution that has helped Jobs Connected to meet the evolving needs of our customers and the industry as a whole.