Role: Only product designer on the project collaborating with the head of product and engineering team. Also served as the interim manager during the development and launch and reported to the CEO during this period.

Skills: Building requirements, user and market research, user flows and wireframes, final designs, prototypes, and usability testing.

Tools: Sketch and Zeplin. Google’s Material Design library for design components.

Duration: 32 weeks (start to launch)

The overarching problem

For the period 2016-2018, our data indicated a very high number of candidate drop-offs during the application process. Shortlist was facing a conversion rate of 15% lower than its targeted conversion.

Based on the survey responses we collected, the older application platform lacked a good experience for candidates:

• There was little information and guidance during the application process, which made candidates feel lost.

• There were many technical issues as part of the experience which created issues for candidates during the application process.

Goals

Based on the core problem being faced by users, the business and design teams decided to design the following parts of the application platform:

• Redesign Shortlist’s Chatbot; a way of gathering candidate information and filtering them out through a built-in algorithm based on the employer’s requirements.

• Design a new page for candidates to track their progress: a candidate’s Job Home.

Research

To validate the problem and get deeper insights, I carried out desk research and interviews.

User research with a focus on inclusion

A key consideration as part of the research was to ensure all our users’ needs were accounted for. I looked into:

• Users across all the geographic locations: India & East Africa.

• Users across different genders, age groups, and seniority levels.

I spoke to three main stakeholder groups:

• Our customer service team in India and Kenya to get a better understanding of the problems users were facing.

• Users of the Shortlist platform to understand their first-hand experience using the platform.

• Non-users of the Shortlist platform to learn more about their experience applying to jobs using other platforms.

Interview insights

Desk research

The focus of desk research was to look at other ways of collecting information from candidates to understand if a chatbot was still the right way to go. I researched the following types of platforms:

• Chatbots (AI-enabled and scripted)

• Forms and surveys

Insights & decisions based on tradeoffs

Rationale: Although the chatbot format made the process of answering questions slightly lengthier, candidates enjoyed this method of engaging way of applying to jobs. Also, research trends indicated that conversational interfaces seemed relevant for the current times, so it made sense to keep the chat-like interface for our chatbot too. We decided to stick to the chatbot aka the conversational form.

Rationale: We considered a smart bot using NLP (Natural Language Processing) and AI. However, for the purpose of just answering questions and some branched flows, a smart one wasn’t worth the cost of new tech infrastructure. We decided to keep it scripted and focused on making it better.

Reframing goals

Based on our conversations with leadership and our users, here are the key product goals:

• Support & guidance: Communicate more, guide candidates through the application process, be their friend. Reduce their anxiety. Allow them to be able to track their application progress, and save and edit their responses.

• Friendly interface and better UX: Improve the interface design and the experience for the user.

• Improved tech: Reduce load times, auto-save a candidate’s response, have a mobile-first approach, build the chatbot on a flexible structure so form questions can be customized by hiring companies.

Solution: User flow and wireframes