UTOPICODE
I helped a Latin American tech recruiter improve their onboarding experience.
DURATION: 3 Weeks
TYPE: Client’s project
RESPONSIBILITIES: Research, Ideation, Design
METHODS: User interviews, Surveys, Heuristic Reviews, Competitive Analysis, Design Studio, Wireframing, Prototyping
TOOLS: Figma Jam, Figma, Maze
Introduction
I had the pleasure of working in a team of 3 along with my course classmates, Agata and Jay. My role in this project included running the primary and secondary research as well as creating the mid-fi and low-fi clickable prototypes.
Our client, Utopicode, a South American tech recruitment platform wanted to improve their current onboarding experience. Their problem was a high abandonment rate. Despite the straightforwardness of the task, we needed to face the challenge of striking a very fine balance. On the one hand, our client requires a lot of information to set up a new account. On the other hand, they did not wish to give an overwhelming impression of asking for too much from a new joiner.
How do we find the perfect middle ground?
Research methods
Our first week’s tasks involved gathering research findings with a series of interviews and online surveys, followed by secondary research which consisted of heuristic reviews of the current Utopicode website and competitive analysis. By the end of week one, we were able to synthesise our data into conclusive concepts of a persona, their journey, a problem statement and a bunch of ideas of how we might best solve the problem our client specified in the brief.
During our first meeting, Utopicode shared with us that senior developers are their primary focus group. To align with our client’s business model, we approached 9 tech professionals with mid to high-level seniority for our interviews. Our interviewees were a fair mix of current Utopicode members, software engineers and UX designers we knew personally and those who have responded to our invitation posted on General Assembly Slack channels.
The insights from our interviews could be summarised by the following recurring themes:
1.Effort
… or better the lack of it. Our users enjoy a platform that will offer quick solutions, such as a one-click feature or autofill.
2. Adaptability
A good product will allow for a degree of customisation according to our users. They want to feel in charge when sharing their data on job searching websites. As one interviewee put it, signing up should mean they are required to put extra information only if need be.
3. Transparency
Our users have repeatedly mentioned that understanding what the benefits of signing up are before they decide to use the product is of the utmost importance to them.
We probed the competition and ran a task analysis of a signup process on different platforms. Although setting up the Utopicode profile arrived very early in the process, it did take many steps before the user was given the sense that their profile was completed. On the contrary, other competitors preferred the user to take some extra steps prior to the profile being set up and in doing so, they bridged the gap between the moment when the profile is created and when the user actually feels they can now use it to find a job.
Looking at the collected data we built two personas who would use the Utopcode site. We based our decision to create two archetypal users, in particular, on our surveys that help us see that two distinctive target groups with distinctive needs might visit the site: a junior and a senior.
To help us further define the problem, we based our ideation and design stages later on the idea of how we might break down the existing onboarding experience at Utopicode into more manageable chunks.
We conducted a heuristic evaluation of the existing website with 9 users transferring their remarks on sticky notes so that all of the pertinent comments could be stored.
The trends from the evaluation oscillated around the sense of overload and murkiness of signing up.
To address it, we decided to be radical. We split the existing profile page into three subcategories to give the sense of manageable steps the user is able to complete. In doing so, we followed the UX principle of chunking.
We took this principle forward to the sketching board.
One of the trends that emerged from our heuristic reviews was the sense of not knowing where the user was in the process of signing up. To address that, we iterated on the idea of having a progress bar that we were then keen to test with our users at a later stage.
Final solution
NEW ONBOARDING EXPERIENCE
The solution our team had come up with successfully addressed our client’s concern about the abandonment rate they suffered from with their existing onboarding experience. Our testing insights showed no signs of dropping out while the users praised the clarity and easiness of the signing up process. We improved in this way the overall user satisfaction rate our client cared about while managing to gather a considerable amount of needed information from new joiners.
9 out of 10 users were happy with the new onboarding experience and said that the order of questions and types of selected menus made sense.