How might we create a better job search experience to drive users to sign up?
Glints’ mission is to help people reach the career of their dreams. To improve this, we needed to improve our job search component to make it more functional and user-friendly for users to easily find the job they want.
I was tasked to redesign our Job search component to help increase our number of sign-ups and job applications.
To start the redesign, we first looked for gaps in our existing search components. We gathered feedback from our Customer Satisfaction Surveys and also and analyzed the data on the search and filters that we tracked on Amplitude.
At the outset, the search component offered multiple built-in filters that users could choose from. However, we observed that only a few of these were actually being used because they were not visible to the users.
We discovered that when a user types a keyword, the suggestions were rather slow in appearing. This is because we show suggestions under a job title, company and location. We also saw that the list of suggestions that appear are unrelated to the keyword that the user typed. For example if the user types "J”, other words without the letter ‘J’ also appear in the suggestion list.
We discovered that when a user types a keyword, the suggestions were rather slow in appearing. This is because we show suggestions under a job title, company, and location. We also saw that the list of suggestions that appear are unrelated to the keyword that the user typed. For example, if the user types "J”, other words without the letter ‘J’ also appear in the suggestion list.
Also, the search component occupied too much of the opening fold and left no more room for other relevant job cards.
Based on our insights, we decided that the search field and the filters, both equally important, needed to be ideated separately to speed up the needed reconstruction of the component.
We also studied 4 competitor websites (LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Angelist, JobStreet) and here are our key takeaways:
Qualitative, moderated remote usability testing
6 active Glints users, 5 new Glints users
To identify if the new functionality is easy to use and more improved than the current functionality
We decide on testing two search boxes (instead of just one) and separating the sort function and the filters. Our goal was to determine which users reached the job details faster and which functionality was more comprehensible to the users.
Qualitative, moderated remote usability testing
We were able to come up with two design options to test for the Filters:
Prototype A
We wanted to try to keep the filters on top and check if users understood the function of collapsing and expanding filters. Our assumption is that we can keep the filters on top but we would need to reduce the number of options they see at the onset to make it less overwhelming.
Prototype B
We noticed that in e-commerce websites the filters were placed on the sidebar, and when users searched for items the filters also changed depending on the keyword. We tested this pattern to see if our users understood this functionality.
Based on all the research and insights, we were able to come up with a search component that allowed the user to prioritize searching for their main keywords: job title and location. This helped users focus on most relevant keywords. We also added search suggestions that would appear instantaneously each time a user types a letter.
We also updated the filter functionality so the user only sees what need based on the availability of date.
This helped to refine the search.
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On mobile, our new design shows more details on the job cards and the filters are more accessible to the users.
There is a fixed search bar that can be clicked for quick browsing.
Our goal was to reduce the time spent by users searching jobs and applying. We were able to achieve this by making the auto-search results more intuitive, removing dummy data from our database and prioritizing job title field and location field. Our SUS score did not score lower than 68 and we were able to increase applications by 5% after the first month.