Careers (Recruitment)

UX DESIGN / UI DESIGN / USER RESEARCH / USABILITY TESTING

Building a better experience for CapMetro jobs recruitment

The Brief – Reimagined the current Careers/Jobs Recruitment section of the website

Deliverables — An interactive lo-fidelity prototype, finished design and code development with the following features:

  • Develop a Careers landing page to serve as an intake and distribution hub to support all acquisition methods for infomation for CapMetro's job related recruitment efforts: public engagement and digital campaigns

My role
Sole UX/UI Designer

In colaboration with:
UX Copywriter: internal team member
Recruitment and user session moderation:
External vendor talent

Duration
8 weeks

Tools
Adobe XD, Photoshop, Illustrator and Teams

An exercise in Lean UX: CapMetro's jobs page is visited by more than 6,500 users per month. The jobs page is the main hub for pushing the agencie's entire online job recruitement efforts.

As the result of a multibillion-dollar voter referendum which was passed in the November 2020 election for the city of Austin - CapMetro was catapulted it into massive growth, and given a mandate to expand public transit to include a more modernize transit system with state of the art innovations and amenities.

As a result, the agencie's needed to grow fast from a small transit agency to a multi-faceted, organization able to run the day to day operations while also building a whole new agency structure capable of tackling future innovations for which it has been mandated.

Step One:
Deep Research and Constant Testing

In this case, the first step of this work was to dive into analytics and user research to quickly validate assumptions.

Mining Analytics
I dove right into the analytics data in order to discover some imediate quanitative insight. Massive amounts of data were available in CapMetro's Google Analytics. The main challenge was sorting through the data to reveal meaningful patterns.

I discovered a significant number of users exhibited the following behaviors:

  • Moving straight from the jobs page to admin jobs board (pre-disqualifying themselves from finding the service provider positions)
  • Moving straight from the jobs page to site search (usually searching for specific job queries, meaning they were not getting the information they needed quickly). It was clear that, despite being in-depth, the jobs page lacked critical information that decreased conversion.

Session Recording
Finally, user session recordings acted as hybrid quantitative/qualitative research. Since the recordings were live, anonymous, and undetected, the results were fairly reliable since they represented user behavior in a natural environment. Session recordings ran continuously throughout the whole design project, providing a stream of data to validate user interviews and usability tests.

User Interviews
Because 10% of the CapMetro jobs page traffic consisted of CapMetro customers through organic searches, the redesign could not neglect such a valuable user group. We interviewed customers not just to validate the other sources of data, but also as a basis for determining how the new jobs page could deliver relevant content to specific user segments.

Step Two:
The Design

I followed a structured process of starting wide, testing, learning, iterating, and narrowing in on an optimal solution with each round

Pencil and Lo-fi Prototyping
Once a major direction was selected, I quickly dove into penciling out a few wireframes just to get a few ideas out. Later I remained in the lo-fi stage for multiple iterations before moving on to visual more robust visual design.

In fact, the lo-fi prototypes bear a striking resemblance to the final product, given all the time spent gathering feedback and direction from users at this critical juncture

We tested with users throughout, from testing paper prototypes to working with our wireframes and on to visual design. The voice of the customer was present throughout the process. This extra voice in my ear was critical. It did not make all the decisions for me, but it helps inform my direction.

Mockups
During the visual design stage, I worked closely with my team discussing the design and development considerations at each step of the process.

While coding wouldn't begin extensively until the hi-fi prototyping, I worked on interactions throughout, all while ensuring the entire team was on the same page.



Visual Design – The photo treatment became a distinctive design element with a focus on evoking user engagement - personalized to the user, which was revealed as a major opportunity in early customer interviews.

Finally, since 64% of CapMetro users access the site via mobile and more than 19% of the U.S. population has specific accessibility needs, compatibility and accessibility elements were critical to the design and accounted for in every step of the process, including the code.

Step Three:
Coding and Testing

The next step was building a clean code, to use in our CMS.

Developing
After completing the visual design, I started on the code - ensuring it was compatible across multiple devices.

I tested the site across devices and resolutions in multiple versions of Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Edge

Step Four:
Constant Testing and Iteration

The new site went live, as planned. The launch was a big success.

I continued to cross-referenced the live site data in Google Analytics and paying close attention to the following metrics:

  • Conversion rate
  • Drop-off rate
  • Goal completion
  • Navigation summary (origin page and destination page)
  • Specific search Queries

Result:
Data-Informed UX Success

This was the first project that the team and I completed using a Lean UX approach, combining data and form together to deliver quick business outcomes. And because the resulting site is as collaborative and flexible as the process itself, future iterations can be made easily and often - keeping the design fresh and responsive to whatever the user needs or business goals might arise.

Post-launch business results:

  • There was a very noticable increase in tracked events and goal conversions based on analitics oservations.
  • Increased engagement with navigational elements
  • Less reported stress among the Peoples and Culture team

CapMetro WebDev is now a firm believer in the Lean UX approach: My team was efficient and collaborated well. Also, users were top of mind throughout the entire process. And as a result, we produced something impactful that we all could really be proud of.