Meet our cast of personas, Neil the Job Seeker and Bianca the Career Advancing. Over time, this cast will grow as we incorporate the Business and Coaches personas, but for now these are the stars for whom the page is designed for. For this case study we will mostly focus on Neil, the Job Seeker.
Neil worked as a nurse for almost two decades, but for the sake of his health and supporting his family, he decides it’s time to make a career change. Thing is, making that leap of faith on your own can be terrifying. Add in the additional factor of how much the American job market has change in the past 20 years and this change can seem insurmountable. He’s dedicated most of his professional life to being a nurse, where could he go next? Where would his skills and experiences apply?
Meanwhile, Bianca has been feeling unfulfilled with her career for a while. She feels stagnant and doesn’t know what to do or how to start changing this. She wants to get noticed, get promoted, and have her compensation reflect all of the work she puts in.
Neil and Bianca saw a post that a colleague shared-- “A career coach?”-- they decide to look into the website and see what all the hype is about.
I know what you’re thinking, how can we understand the true value of the work we’re doing and how is this benefitting the business? For this, we highlight the need for quantifiable research and analyzing data. Combining this with qualitative research in the future would be even greater, but for now these tools are immediately available for us to observe. Over time, we will see the impact of our launch by looking into website analytics.
As with most projects, research is an absolute must for paving the way forward with design. Before we got our hands dirty and started spitting out solutions, our team researched best practices for a testimonial page. What was the current webpage doing right? What could it do more of? How can we make informed decisions that will persuade users like Bianca and Neil when they immediately go to the Reviews page?
Equipped with constraints and with clear goals set in mind, we tackled the first and arguably primary issue: presenting a large amount of content meaningfully without making major changes to the information nor removing. How can we inform users of the different types of individual clients CCPro caters to?
The initial thought process was to utilize our horizontal space using carousels or sliders--seemed obvious enough to my designer brain, right? Boy was I wrong, after presenting to our product owner, she flagged some usability concerns.What if our job seeker, Neil, wasn’t as technologically savvy? According to NNG research, it’s easy and common for users to overlook sliders and not even realize that they’re there in the first place! With this design, Neil could have reached this page and be put off by the lack of sufficient reviews! “Only one client? Maybe I should go to a different career coach.” he might think.
After a few more rounds of feedback and iteration, we reach our finalized form: spotlighting the most persuasive and impactful review and provide 3 additional reviews from professionals in varying fields. Neil sees this and trusts that although he might not know where he wants to take his career, he trusts that CCPro has experience with all walks of life and that he would be in good hands. Bianca sees reviews from people wanting to shine in their current roles and trusts that this business can help her too, and not just career transitioners.
We also added a subpage filled with even more reviews from very happy and satisfied clients. We figured the homepage served a very particular purpose, to prioritize brevity and efficacy. The subpage exists as supplementary information. Bianca looking at this page meant she already looked into the main page and decided to look even deeper, she is already interested and is only more amazed at just how many happy clients come from CCP.
On the landing page laid a diamond in the rough just waiting to shine: a graphic that contained KPIs gathered from researching client success. We thought since the reviews will be listed and at times, dense with text, providing a visual break and speedy answer to the question: “What do I have to gain as a client of this service?” For users who might just be quickly scanning, the visual difference and easily digestible information will be catered to too. There’s a chance that these KPIs will increase user interest and encourage them to read more to see how this success is even possible and if it’s true.
These KPI headers serve a double function of sectioning the page and informing Neil and Bianca that CCP can help people looking for new jobs AND people looking to upskill and grow.
One thing worth mentioning that ties into our theme of MVP, is the decision made with navigation. We settled on tab navigations to section: “Individuals”, “Businesses”, and “Coaches.” Seemed easy enough and we confirmed that Wix is capable of this. But when it came to implementation, all we had at the moment was the Individuals page with the others a work in progress. What do we do then? Should we still incorporate the tabs, at the cost of making the webpage look incomplete? How would it reflect on CCP if Bianca or Neil curiously clicked on “Businesses” only to be met with “Page under construction.”
Although the page is incomplete, the users don’t need to know what won’t negatively impact them. During implementation, we opted the tabs out while ensuring we left a space for later implementation.
One final flag was raised and we were met with concerns for the mobile view. Because of the nature of a smaller screen, all the elements would need to be stacked on each other. If Neil or Bianca are on the fence and decide to look at the reviews on their phone perhaps at a doctors appointment or at the grocery store, they might get really frustrated at how long it took to get to the reviews. Brevity is the priority and especially so on mobile, where users generally expect quick and concise.
We removed the KPI headers for mobile, as they’re a nice addition when you can afford the real estate, but not absolutely necessary for a smaller screen.
What a wild ride it’s been and I’m sure Bianca and Neil have already booked their initial meetings after reading the impressive reviews. It was a huge learning lesson in overcoming nerves from facing new challenges: ie working in Agile. Hard work paid off and I’m proud to say our team was the quickest to understand the assignment and get our product to launch. There’s still a lot of work to be done, such as building the other sections, adding reviews to other pages, and conducting tests to see how effective the page really is. With time and data analytics, we’ll know for sure what kind of impact the new and improved Reviews page will have on CareerCoachingPro.
