(Client Project)

Redesigning the onboarding experience to set clients up for career success

OVERVIEW

The Job Sauce is a professional resume writing and career coaching service. The clientele they specialize in are mid-to-executive level professionals who are looking for that dream job, promotion or an increase in salary.

DURATION

3 Week Sprint

TEAM

3 UX Designers: Geri de los Santos (myself), Olivia Liang, Alex Medan

MY ROLE

I developed journey maps for user, assisted on archetype creation and affinity mapping, conducted field research interviews, sketched, created wireframes, worked on visual design with my teammates and helped to build the interactive prototype.

This was a collaborative project where all team members participated in some research, ideation, and design.

Methods:

• Quantitative & Qualitative Research

• Competitive & Comparative Analysis

• Affinity Mapping

• Empathy Mapping

• Journey Mapping

• Interviews

• Archetypes

• User Flow

• Sketching

• Wireframing

• Usability Testing

• Prototyping (UI & Visual Design)

CHALLENGE

The Job Sauce wanted to redesign their onboarding process. They wanted to improve the overall experience for current clients and attract future clients as well. The redesign can potentially help increase the conversion rate from their landing page to their order page. If the new redesign can provide a better user experience, this could also set them up to be able to sell their career coaching program.

RESEARCH

Where to start? Aside from what the information the client provided, our team wanted to run through a digital analysis the onboarding website to see where we could find what was working and what were the pain points. The resume-writing service has a few steps, but for our focus of the 3-week design sprint, our scope was just to focus on the following steps.

ONBOARDING STEPS

Landing Page > Order Package > Questionnaire Page > Schedule Appointment

DIGITAL ANALYSIS: We started by reviewing the current website. We wanted to see what was working and what wasn’t. Overall impression is that there was no hierarchy and the content was either not enough or a bit confusing. After our initial digital review of the website, these were a few points we took away.

We wanted to further test our evaluation of the onboarding experience and decided to do some contextual inquiry and interviews to see how users felt about the site. These were a few concerns brought up by users.

We also had our users pin point their pain points as they were reviewing the site. This very beneficial and provided great data as to where on their onboarding experience they were feeling the most concerns.

After doing the research, we gathered up all of our information to synthesize the data through affinity mapping. We had the feedback we were looking for, and together with the insights we noticed as a UX team on our own, we combined data that was gathered from interview, contextual inquiry and secondary research into an affinity map. We did this in order make groupings based on their natural relationship with others.

From this, we were able to piece together three themes that users felt while navigating the onboarding process. We continued to dig deeper with finding key themes and similar concerns to find out key insights that users felt overall.

These are the three key insights we discovered:

• Lost - Users generally felt confused on how to navigate through the onboarding process, and felt confused as to what the entire onboarding process would entail past the landing page.

• Uniformed - Users felt like there wasn’t enough information that was needed for them to move forward and make a purchase.

• Untrustworthy of the service - There was a lack of context describing The Job Sauces’ resume writing service, and why their service stands out from the competition, user’s felt that the service couldn’t be counted on.

SOLUTION

After doing the research, synthesizing the data and finding our key insights, our solution was to redesign the onboarding experience that was more credible, while being logical and showing value of the onboarding process. This would make clients feel more comfortable and confident about the service because people are looking for clarity and assurance before making a purchase. We grouped the insights into three groupings, credibility, value, and functionality (logic). This was done to segway our deliverables into categories we could tie the insights back to.

OUR DESIGN APPROACH

Now that we had three insights to back up our design approach, we decided to focus on the landing page and the questionnaire the most. We also had a few design constraints that we had to design around. Our client was still going to use the same service for their appointment scheduler. For parts of the onboarding that we could not design for, we provided content suggestions. The landing page is very vital to the success of the resume-writing service as it gives the client a first impression of who and what The Job Sauce is about. The second focus was on the questionnaire page because this is where useful information can help the writer achieve the goals they want to accomplish from the resume writing service.

OUR EARLY WIREFRAMES

We wanted to create visuals and content that kept the user informed throughout the entire process of the onboarding experience. Providing clear, concise and informative information will help put the user at ease and help them make the informed decision if this resume-writing service is for them. Our initial early wireframes helped us to conduct usability testing to see if our design addressed our key insights.

With the feedback from our usability testing, we went back and did a few iterations and did more usability testing to see that our design was still on point to our insights. We also had our client be part of our design journey so that there would be no surprises at the end. After all the tweaks, more testing and iterations, we decided to create some high fidelity wireframes.

HIGH FIDELITY WIREFRAME DELIVERABLES

For our final design iteration, we created high fidelity wireframes. We wanted our designs to reflect and relay back to each of the three deliverables our solution. Our team created a redesign of the onboarding experience with the insights of showing logic, value, and credibility in mind to help prioritize the users needs and concerns.

LOGIC: We created simple and understandable content and questions.

VALUE: We designed plan comparisons to help the client choose which plan works best for what they need.

CREDIBILITY: We provided simplified infographics to show the resume-writing process and how the service works.

Below are the before and after comparisons of the landing page and questionnaire page.

ONBOARDING FINAL REDESIGN FEEDBACK

Overall, after once again doing more usability testing with the high fidelity design, users seemed to respond well to the new changes. People felt that we had hit the three insights we uncovered and had prioritized the needs of the user.

THE JOB SAUCE ONBOARDING SOLUTION

Prototype Demo

NEXT STEPS

Overall, the client was very happy with the deliverables provided in this 3-weeks sprint, but still feel there are tweaks needed to be done to the design. We would continue to tighten up the design and continue to do more testing. The client is going through an overhaul rebrand of their company, so color and visuals would be affected and would need to match the new identity.

WHAT I LEARNED

Doing research is key in finding out what is working and what isn’t. From conducting our research and synthesizing the data, we were able to come up with some key insights that helped with our design approach.

Always keep the user in mind. As much as your client would like blue sky thinking and fancy bells and whistles, it is really the user you would need to keep in mind when prioritizing. Because if a user experience is flawed, it not only provides an unhappy user, but strays away from the business needs of the client.

What may seem straight forward and simple mixed in with the sky is the limit freedom, may be a lot harder than what you initially thought it would be. From the start, know your constraints, both time and design wise. Setting and prioritizing key goals to hit for your project will keep it running.