Jobzest

April – May 2024
INST367 at the University of Maryland

OVERVIEW

Supporting the Youth in their Career Search

The online job search process can be challenging, especially for teenagers and young adults who have no clue what they want to do with their lives. Our website, Jobzest, fills a need in the market by allowing users to search for jobs without knowing what they want out of a job. Jobzest takes users’ interests and turns them into the careers of their dreams.

Problem

High school and college students are expected to know what they want to do with their lives at such a young age. Many of us barely know what we want to eat for dinner tonight, let alone knowing what we want to spend the next 60 years of our lives doing every single day. Searching for potential career paths is also a major headache. While we may know what we would like to do in the future, it can be challenging to connect that passion to an established line of work. Even if we have a future job title in mind, how many positions are out there right now that have slightly different official titles but perform the same set of tasks every day? Navigating this mess of a job market is next to impossible for entry-level individuals. 

Our Goal

Jobzest was created to help support students and young adults navigate the job market, providing them with the information they need to choose a career path that aligns with their interests and skills as well as providing them with real-world opportunities to begin their new career path, all in one cohesive package.

Discover

Understanding our Userbase

To better understand the problem, we first need to understand those who are most affected by them.

Taking the time to interview other entry-level job applicants to better understand the current issues plaguing the online job search market was crucial to empathizing with our potential users and learning what issues were most important to tackle. 

User Persona

After listening to our target audience and grouping our interview results into an affinity map, we began to create our user persona. This persona would help guide us during future steps of the design process and make sure we always keep the user in mind when working on this project.

Competitive Analysis

Being able to fully understand our potential user base led us to begin ideating potential solutions to the issues plaguing the current entry-level job search landscape. But first, we must understand the competition in the entry-level job search market: what the current landscape does well as well as what they are missing.

Performing our competitive analysis gave us great insight into elements users are accustom to seeing on job search sites as well as potential features that are not yet mainstream. These basic yet crucial features are very important for a successful job search service, but we were still missing our game changing feature that would set us apart. Just making “LinkedIn, but better” wasn’t going to cut it for us.

Taking a deeper look at our potential user base, we began to see a deeper problem emerging. Students complain about a lack of potential job positions in their desired field, but we noticed that many of them only search for very rigid versions of their particular occupation.

Then, it finally hit us!

If we could find a way to increase visibility to these jobs that, while not having the same titles, perform the same daily tasks, we could open up the job market to these individuals and greatly increase their chances at finding a position. At the same time, we could help younger individuals who have no clue what they want in a potential career by helping them search without knowing the specific job titles. If users were able to search by interest instead of solely by job title, we would have something that no one else has while supporting our users in their struggle to find a fulfilling career path. We had our flagship feature.

PRototype

Wireframe and Initial Testing

After some quick (and crude) sketches to get on the same page, we took to Figma to come up with our first wireframes. Our goal was to get a minimum viable product in order to user test as quickly as possible.

While this rendition certainly was viable, there was a few key issues we discovered after our first round of user testing:

– It was confusing to users what was the difference between “position” and “job” was

– The account creation process could feel overwhelming if not using another service like Google or LinkedIn to create an account

– ​​​​​​​Users were confused about the function of “employee previous paths”

– Lack of connectedness between the search bar and “broaden my results” switch

High Fidelity Prototyping

From this feedback, we began to work on a high-fidelity prototype of our design, implementing these UX changes as well as adding common UI elements and creating a design style for our brand.

Here are some of the biggest changes we made to our original design:

Unique branding

Choosing a gradient theme that differentiates us from the constant blue and green theming of other job search sites

Differentiate between “jobs” and “positions”

Distinct visual differences help users understand which listings are positions and which sections are for job information

Simple interaction

Adding quick options to save jobs and positions to make user interaction as seamless as possible

Simplify sign up process

Streamlining the sign up information haul as not to overwhelm new users

While these changes along with a tight deadline forced us to cut some potential features (more in-depth job description page for saved jobs, fleshed out about us and tips pages, integrated application process, etc.), we feel it was crucial to get our core flow down first before delving into extraneous features. If we were to return to this project, there are plenty of ideas we could hash out.

View our final prototype walkthrough here:

Takeaways

What did we learn?

I had a blast with this project. While my role was mainly focused on the search pages as well as the single position page, I really enjoyed contributing to each and every bit of this project. Reflecting back, there are some improvements that can be made to the overall user experience, such as further distinguishing “jobs” from “positions” and creating a more cohesive brand language, but I am still very proud of the work we were able to accomplish.
Creating Jobzest taught me a lot: how I enjoy brainstorming in groups, how best to make a cohesive design when divvying up pages, and how to turn a Figma file into a potential product launch, just to name a few; most importantly, creating Jobzest taught me how to be a true UX designer. From problem statement to launch plan, this was the first time I’d ever been through the entirety of a product launch process. Because of the skills and experience this project gave me, I’m confident in my abilities to transition into a real-world UX design team.

How to brainstorm as a group

Brainstorming works best in group settings, but only if you are able to let go of the fear of “bad ideas” as well as supporting your teammates through their ideation process

Creating one design language as a team

Even though each of us completed different sections of the prototype, we were able to use our established design language to make the final product feel as cohesive as it would with one designer

How to be a UX designer

From initial idea to product launch plan, Jobzest has shown me how ideas are turned into reality

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