Case Study
Usability testing for Indeed's job search flow for international students
Overview
MY ROLES AND RESPONSIBILTIES
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UX Research
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Heuristic Evaluation
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Usability Testing
PROJECT
Timeline : August 21 - November 21
Team : 4 members
CONTEXT
Indeed is a job site with over 250 million unique visitors every month. It gives the visitors free access to search for jobs, post resumes, and research companies.
There are 900,000+ international students Indeed can convert to their preferred job-seeking platform. So we wanted to find whether Indeed’s job search experience could be improved for international students.
Understanding
PROBLEM
With over 250 million unique visitors every month we were tasked with identifying issues with Indeed's user flows. As a team we were challenged on which user paths to consider, what personas to test for, to identify problems and make
recommendations to improve the user flows.
INTERVIEWS
In order to find the path we wanted to focus on for the usability testing, we conducted preliminary interviews with 2 stakeholders at indeed and 5 users with experience using Indeed.
We were looking for the answers to following questions:
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What were the most important tasks they perform while using Indeed?
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Which flow should we select to improve the user experience?
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What was the persona of the users we wanted to focus on?
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Were there any user needs Indeed didn't support?
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How would they describe their past and current experiences with Indeed?
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How did they in the past use other job site and resources for the same purpose as Indeed?
Persona
To understand the problems faced by the international students while searching for the jobs which sponsor visa we spoke with a few students from our university and created our user persona which is shown below.
User Journey
After studying the responses from the preliminary interviews, we got an idea of all the major tasks users performed and the paths they took while navigating through the website. Then we created the user journey map to find the pain points of users and the areas of improvement. This helped us figure out the flow we wanted to focus on going forward.
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Design Challenge
Our challenge was to compare how international students felt while using indeed.com and handshake.com and find out their pain points while looking for sponsored jobs. Based on the findings from the user tests we had to make recommendations for Indeed on how to improve the user experience for international students.
What we did
We did a comparative usability test between Indeed and Handshake - a job search platform catering to college students.
changed the order of tasks to reduce the chances of it influencing the results.
Counter-balancing
Asked people to fill 10 questions screener form to select the right users for the usability testing
10 Question Screener
Conducted 1 pilot test and 8 user tests, 60 mins each to compare Indeed and Handshake
User
Test
Asked users to perform 3 tasks: 1. Search, 2. Verify, 3. Doesn't Sponsor for both the websites
User
Tasks
Asked a few debriefing questions to the users & fill the SUS to get more feedback
Debriefing & SUS
Participants
We selected 8 international students as per the responses received from the screener. We made sure to get users with diversity in work experience, location and job interests in order to get unbiased insights.
Measures
QUALITATIVE MEASURES
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What paths did they take?
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How was their experience?
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Easier to use
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More intuitive
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Better for browsing/filtering/finding job
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Overall preference
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Complete task
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Abandoned/ Gave Up
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Time on Task
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SUS
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NPS
QUALITATIVE MEASURES
Click here to view the usability test details.
Findings
We got a lot of interesting insights from the user tests. A few of them are shown below:
FINDING 1
Some users were not able to find a sponsored job on indeed
FINDING 2
The filters on indeed are inconsistent
FINDING 3
All users found jobs that don't sponsor visas even after applying "sponsorship" filter
FINDING 4
Its not easy to find the work authorization details on indeed
FINDING 5
Confusing language used for work authorization details on handshake
FINDING 6
Indeed provides more options due to larger database
FINDING 7
SUS scores for handshake is much better than Indeed
Click here to view the detailed findings from the usability tests.
Recommendations
Based on the findings from the usability test we came up with some recommendations to improve Indeed's job search experience for international students:
RECOMMENDATION 1 : WHAT USERS SAID HANDSHAKE DOES WELL
The work authorization details are mentioned at the beginning is easy to find and properly displayed on Handshake. Handshake also has a dedicated filter for work authorization details which makes it easier for the international students to search for sponsored jobs.
RECOMMENDATION 2 : FILTERS
Indeed currently has inconsistent filters and a long list of options where only one option can be selected at a time. So we redesigned the benefits filter with a search box and multi-select option. The same design and multi-select functionality can be used for the other filters.
RECOMMENDATION 3 : EMPLOYER SIDE
In the current form for a job posting filled by the employer, there is no option for selecting visa sponsorship details and hence the users are not able to find the information easily. We recommend adding a visa sponsorship option in the employer side form.
RECOMMENDATION 4 : KEYWORD RESULTS
It is difficult to find the details as per the keywords entered in the search box. So we recommend highlighting the keyword on the page so that it is easy to find.
Learnings & Future Scope
Working on this project taught me:
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Refining our task language
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Copy/pasting tasks during usability testing
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Pilot testing
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Counterbalancing
What we would like to do better:
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Create personas from screener categorizations
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Participants complete tasks without speaking aloud
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Divide time-on-tasks: 1) Exploring site 2) Searching
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Increase sample size