I attended the UX in the City conference a few days ago and really enjoyed it. I took part in a UX design challenge posed by one of the conference’s sponsors – ECOM Recruitment. It was a chance for me to apply my UX skills.
The challenge called “Careers Page Conundrum” required participants to redesign a careers’ page in order to meet the needs of two personas. There were prizes for the best three submissions.
This blog post is a quick documentation of my thought process behind my submission.
The first thing that struck me looking at the careers’ web page was “Our Careers” header. My eyes were naturally drawn to the biggest visual image on the page.
There were three things which I felt needed to change in this header in order to be of interest to the personas.
(1) I considered the text ” Our Careers” to be too passive. “Join Us” was an active and better replacement.
(2) The image of the two female hands on the laptop and paper didn’t really say anything about the page. A better option was to replace it with a slideshow of current staff members (preferably smiling) with their first name and job title below their photos. This gives potential job applicants some named human faces to connect with rather than a faceless person’s hands.
(3) The job category boxes on the header section were distracting. They were competing with the image and didn’t really stand out. The white text on dark background didn’t really work. Also, I wasn’t sure if the boxes were clickable but if they were then there was a high probability for a potential job applicant to click a box category and discover it was empty because there weren’t any current vacancies. My solution was to take the job category boxes out of the header section and instead have a listing of vacancies called “Current Openings” in the right-hand section of the page where you have various award logos. This enables potential applicants to have a complete overview of all the current openings in the company and click relevant vacancies.
- I moved all the award logos from the right-hand side of the page to the bottom of the page in other to accommodate the most important thing on the page – “Current Openings”.
- I didn’t think the was a need for an “About Us” text on this page. There should already be an “About Us” page elsewhere on the website. The focus of this page is to persuade talented job applicants to join the company. I eliminated the first two paragraphs of text and only used the content of the last three paragraphs.
- I also introduced a section below these three paragraphs called “Why you will love working at XX” and recommended listing 5 key benefits of working for the company.
- I kept the “Search for job title or keyword” box at the very top of the page but got rid of the “View available position” box because it wasn’t adding much value to the page. The “View available positions” box was redundant because it was replicating the task of the job search box and the current openings in the middle of the page.
My submission won the second prize – £50 Amazon voucher which has already been spent on UX related Kindle books. It was a thrill to come second given that as a UX newbie, I was competing against experienced UX practitioners.
2nd place of the @uxcitymcr design challenge goes to @olaojo15 !!! #uxcitymcr #ECOM
— Jon Bywater (@JonBywaterUX) March 16, 2018
