Context

During my first semester of MS, I have taken the course of Usability which focuses on User Experience Research. As the final project for this course, I am doing UX benchmarking for the well known job portal - Indeed.

Problem

To understand which features and functions on job site of indeed are intuitive and easy for job seekers to use and which still need improvement in terms of user experience.

Details

Length: Sept 2021-Nov 2021

Role: User researcher

Team : 5 members

Top Tasks 1.0

To figure out the top task of the website, we first documented all of the task flows of the system. And then we prioritized the top tasks based on the initial screening using only 2 users of the system.

Top task 1

Top task 2

Heuristic Evaluation

Before jumping into quantitative research methods, we first decided to conduct heuristic evaluation on the defined top tasks in order to describe aspects that require some improvement for the benefit of usability. Below is the executive summary from our Heuristic Evaluation report.

User Interviews

We conducted 10 user interviews of which I individually took 2. Based on the interviews we could pinpoint some repititive pain points as well as positive/negative attributes of Indeed.

10 interviews

Affinity diagram

Top Tasks 2.0

The user interviews gave us an insight that users do not know of or use the search and compare task. We decided if it wasnt a usual task for the users, it will not be a top task. Instead we discovered that the use of advanced search feature was a top task.

Improvised Top task 1

Search and apply with resume and advanced filters

Improvised Top task 2

Search for a company

Usability test plan

Further on, I created an outline of test session to be used by my team as a high level outline of how the test session will go.

Includes :

• Overal Scope
• Specificities of participants
• Sequence of tasks including task instructions and descriptions
• An estimate of time alloted to each task
• Task specific questions
• Post task questions

Moderated Testing

Created a moderator script for user testing. Conducted moderating user testing on 10 user with each of them filling a SUS survey afterwards.

Key learnings

• Ability to adapt according to the participant
• Ability to extract information from participant's subtle comments
• Digging deep into user agitations
• Make the user deal with issues/glitches encountered to understand their perspective and view

Task 1

Finding 1 : Users have difficulty locating the search bar, and didn’t have confidence using it.

Recommendation 1 : Redirect users to homepage upon login

Finding 2 : Users have a difficulty getting relevant search results

Recommendation 2 : Modify the search results page to display only relevant and accurate results.the website can further provide auto suggestions to help refine user search [Similar to Amazon’s “Other people also searched for this”]. Allow sorting of search resuts by date; rating; location; relevance etc.

Finding 3 : Most users did not utilize the filtering functionality efficiently when searching for jobs

Recommendation 3 : Redesign the filter section of Indeed’s webpage by visually differentiating the filtering buttons. To increase usefulness, add filtering by industry/vertical; and a finer degree of control for distance.

Finding 4 :Search Filter Limitation and Missing Filters- if you’re using filters, from each of the filter you’re allowed to select only one option

Recommendation 4 : Allow selection of multiple options in the filter category and add additional filters such as Sponsorship, No Clearance etc. which are deemed important for international students.

Finding 5 : Finding 5: After uploading the resume, Indeed doesn’t have the functionality to autopopulate fields on job application forms

Recommendation 5 : Redesign the website to allow resume to autopopulate common fields of the application process

Finding 6 :Users have difficulty in contacting employees of their interest company/No social media networking feature on Indeed

Recommendation 6 : Incorporate social media networking aspect onto Indeed

Task 1 evaluation metrics

System usabilitiy score (SUS)

Task 2

Finding 1 : On clicking create an online resume, users get confused with the ‘you’re about to leave indeed website’ popup.

Recommendation 1 : The user is not leaving the indeed website but only opening a new tab. So it would be better to not have a popup that is confusing the users.

Finding 2 : Users are not happy with having to enter personal details at every step.

Recommendation 2 : Give users the option to choose or edit the name that’s already associated with their account

Finding 3 : No preview option present after filling in the details in the resume.

Recommendation 3 : Give the preview of the resume right after the details are entered

Finding 4: Problems with the resume builder in Indeed - List of skills that were given to add to the resume were somewhat irrelevant after the frist 2-3 and they were unlimited. Also, there was no place to add projects on the resume.

Recommendation 4 : Give users more freedom in terms of creating sections of their choice and limit the skills sections

Task 2 evaluation metrics

System usabilitiy score (SUS)

Future research plans

Diverse our pool of participants:

Perform comparative analysis with other popular platforms

Explore the ‘company reviews’ and other functionalities provided by Indeed

Collaborate with other teams to investgate different lenses of possible future evaluations.