Improving conversion rates with a mobile job search feature

Research
·
UX Design
·
UI Design
·
Interaction Design

Project Summary

WorkOnward, a hiring platform for small business and job seekers, didn’t have a mobile design for their website. The team and I designed a mobile version of our job search feature to address mobile-specific users' needs.

Impact

  • Increased conversion rates by 23%
  • Improved feedback loops to iterate on designs
Team
3 UX Designers
5 Software Engineers
Product Manager
Timeframe
3 months
Problem

WorkOnward's hiring platform had a glaring gap: there was no mobile presence.

Job seekers regularly accessed our website on their phones, only to exit when they discovered it wasn’t mobile-friendly.

With over half of our traffic coming from mobile devices, we needed a better experience for these users.
Goal

To develop a mobile-friendly platform, our main goal was to create a simplified, mobile version of our map-based job search feature.

It was a tool both account and non-account users could access on our platform, and often users’ first interaction with our website. We needed to make a good impression.
Discovery

At the beginning of the project, two crucial questions framed my approach: 

What details motivated job seekers to view jobs?
On a smaller screen, users wouldn't be able to see all job details right away. I needed to discover which details they wanted easy access to.
How could we make the application process feel effortless?
Past interviews indicated job seekers had struggled with cluttered interfaces on our platform and desired quick, streamlined paths to information.

With limited space, we had to decide whether the default view would be a map or a list.

Both emphasized different details that may be important to users at a glance. To make a decision, I set out to discover what information motivated users to view a job.

Four categories appeared to influence job seekers' decision to apply.

From stakeholder conversations, I defined the most likely valued information as salary, benefits, location, and duties.
But surveying users showed salary and location were the most important elements. leading me to anchor the experience in the map view.

Salary

Benefits

Location

Duties

The map view aligned with information users valued most.

1. Anchoring the experience in the map view helped job seekers visualize distance.
2. I emphasized salary in bold to help users spot the information at a glance.

Next, I focused on the application experience itself.

In early concepts, we considered breaking up the application into two steps.

However, user feedback suggested there was too much information in each step.

So, I split the application further.

I broke the application into three steps, allowing whitespace to improve cognitive load.
Final designs

The new mobile experience for job searching:

Results

After several UI iterations, we launched our final designs, increasing conversion rates by 23%.

Learnings

Two takeaways I had from this experience:

Always room for improvement
Looking back, there were more opportunities to emphasize wage and location had we had more time, such as including salary as a pinpoint in the map view.
Getting creative with data
Despite time and budget constraints, I was able to find and implement affordable tools to help us validate designs and identify design improvement that had major impacts.

Check out more of my work

Increasing active users with a website overhaul

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