Zaio Job Board
Assisting those breaking into software development with opportunities
Role: UX Designer / UX Researcher
Timeline: 1 month (July - August 2022)
Tools: Figma, Miro, Google Forms
Teammates: Audrey Stephanie, Franklin Pham, Vivian Pham
Overview
Zaio is an E-Learning coding platform looking to de-risk the hiring process with a work-ready graduate training program that addresses the core competency gap. They forge graduates into work-ready talent in 6-8 weeks through online coding courses. They develop customized, gamified learning journeys based on their clients’ technology-stack, internal tools, and culture.
Zaio has built a community with their online coding courses, live tutoring hours, and collaborative users. To expand their platform and help their users break into software development, Zaio tasked us with creating the first iteration of a job board that allows aspiring developers to see opportunities and for companies to post their offerings.
Research
Since this was the first iteration of Zaio’s job board, my team and I couldn’t get feedback on any existing prototypes. We looked to competitive analysis of other popular job boards and sent out a survey to gain insights in order to understand our users and lead our design direction.
We created a survey and sent it out to 16 Zaio users.
Survey
We asked Zaio users what they found peculiarly difficult about using job boards. We found out the most concerning points were:
Manually typing in information that can be found on resume
"The portals are asking the same questions thats on the CV"
"Manually having to fill in CV details when we also have to upload our actual CV"
Hard to filter out distinct attributes of a job posting / job board
"a lot of jobs don't list the salary and you have to read through the whole listing to get one small piece of information.."
"Trying to find an EMEA remote work is hard because most of the remote work on the job boards are USA, especially the ones I could qualify for."
70% of users who used job boards in the past found these attributes of current job boards prevented them from successfully applying.
We also looked to Zaio users to understand what features our job board would contain.
The top three features users looked for were:
Reviews (of workplaces)
Job feed
Upload Resume Feature
Competitive Analysis
Based on the survey, the most used online job boards among our users were LinkedIn and Indeed. We conducted 4 user interviews and asked users to apply for a job through either Linkedin or Indeed and tell us about the experience.
We asked questions such as:
What feature did you find the most valuable and why?
What did you like the least when attempting to apply for a job?
What do you like about the interface? Do you think it is easy to use, and if so, what makes it that way?
Our user interviews revealed that the certain filter features and intuitive interfaces of Indeed and Linkedin were positive aspects of each product.
Improvable aspects include: lack of information (no salary or no date of job posting).
Define
Insights
Users want a clear filtering system when it comes to job boards
Include more information, such as modalities of work and salary
Easier non-repetitive applying process
User Personas
Self-taught new grad looking to break into software development
Ideation
User Flows
Low Fidelity
Mid Fidelity
Final Design
Job Seeker Side - Home Page + Filters
Users are able to view different jobs and filter jobs according to location, full or part time work, salary, and the date of job posting.
Job Seeker Side - Detailed Job Description + View Company Page
Users are able to view a detailed job description of a posting on the job feed. From there, users are able to view more information about the company including reviews, other job postings, and pictures of the workplace.
Job Seeker Side - User Profile + Inbox
Users are able to have their own profile listing their education, organizations, certificates, and more. Also, users can see job notifications for updates on their applications or when a new job is posted. Users can also chat with company representatives.
Reflection
Challenges
This project was definitely a challenging one to figure out for my team and I. We had one month to put out a job board, and we found that it was a lot to research and design.
There was no design lead or design direction with our project, so we had to really create our own deadlines and stay close to a steady design process the whole way.
We couldn’t really do any user interviews since Zaio primarily has users located in South Africa, so the timezones didn’t align with my team. We stuck with surveys to compensate and to get a user voice.
Takeaways
I learned how to advocate for UX in this project. UX wasn’t really mature yet, and we were just expected to create some UI designs. When we did research and multiple stages of prototyping, our advisors really took note of that and I think they learned a lot about what the design process is.
If we had more time, we would try to user test our high fidelity prototype with job seekers and job posters.
