Designing User Experiences to drive conversions and profit for your recruitment site

Simon Conroy, CEO Madgex Ltd

What is user experience?

Simple – it’s the experience a visitor has when they come to your site.

Defining User Experience (UX)

Visitors normally have a goal in mind (e.g. find a job), and your site design can make it easier or harder for them.

For example:• How many steps does a task take?• Is there a learning curve?• Do users have to jump through hoops to get what they want?

Setting the scene

In April this year, Forrester did a User Experience review of 12 US Job Boards

• Forrester are an impartial, objective research company with no agenda

• They applied tried and tested User Experience evaluation methods

ALL 12 SITES FAILED

ALL 12 SITES FAILEDFinancial ServicesAIGCitigroupMerrill LynchThe Goldman Sachs Group

Job BoardsCareerBuilder.comMonsterDiceYahoo HotJobs

RetailersJCPenneyKroger Macy’s Rite Aid

Across the sites tested, Forrester found...?

• Simple tasks like checking the status of a job application were difficult to complete.Excessive banner advertising often obscured key content

• Too many steps in critical tasks like job application was highly likely to cause drop-out.

• Content was often cramped, causing poor readability • Error messages tended to be confusing and tricky to recover from

We’re talking about 12 top name US job boards here...

....Technically complex ... All the machinery of Marketing & PR behind them

....Yet they fail on user experience!

This is like designing a state of the art hotel...

Photo used with permission. Photo created by 770: http://flickr.com/people/770/

... But then making it really difficult for customers to get in!

Photo used with permission. Photo created by fortinbras: http://flickr.com/photos/fortinbras/

How has the recruitment industry got itself into this situation?

Lets start by thinking about what we are paying attention to.

© Eames & Eames (1977)

© Eames & Eames (1977)

Exercise: what do these common web marketing terms conjure in your mind?

Funneling.Conversion.

Chutes.

Do they sound like things people choose to do? Or things that happen to people?

Somehow we de-humanize our users! They aren’t mindless animals to be herded down funnels and chutes.

The key to a successful UX is not to design for statistics.

It’s to design for individual experiences.

Usability TestingEthnography

Depth InterviewsHeuristic EvaluationCard Sorting Studies

A/B TestingMultivariate Testing

SurveysRemote Async Testing

Diary StudiesContextual Enquiry

Focus GroupsCognitive Walkthroughs

Eye TrackingCo-Discovery studies

Consistency InspectionsGuideline ChecklistsClickstream analysis

1) Job Board User Experiences up close: some common mistakes.

2) How you can avoid making similar mistakes

What I am going to talk about:

Yahoo’s Hotjobs

Started in 2002

One of the larger US job boards

Mistake 1: pogo-sticking

Users have to be clicking in and out of item detail pages rather than being able to compare the items side-by-side.

This causes frustration!

Pogo-sticking

Research findings from UIE Independent user research carried out by UIE shows that in some cases, designs that avoid pogo sticking can produce 5x higher conversion rates!

Source: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2883525/uie-listing

On-page comparison

Pogo-sticking

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%

55%

11%

It’s easy for a user to enter a URL incorrectly – e.g. When copying and pasting from an email.

Lets see how monster copes with broken URLs...

Mistake 2: The unfriendly 404 page

What happens if you put a broken Job URL into monster?

They are forcing their users to jump through hoops...

SimplyHired have a much more graceful response

Since they know the user is lost, they takes step to help them out.

• Explanation is given

• Search tool is provided

• Navigation suggestions are provided.

Mistake 3: the unsubscribe roach motel

Email alerts are the life blood of recruitment sites.

It’s tempting to make them easy to turn on but a pain to turn off!

Roaches users

can check in,

but they can’t

check out!

Subscribe is easy

Registration is quick – it’s easy to think of a password

Unsubscribe is hard

Hmm, which password did I sign up with?

I’ll try this one...

Oh dear, that didn’t work...

I’d better click “forgot your password”

Type my email address again.

OK, now I need to check my

email, wait for it to come through...

Mistake 3: the unsubscribe roach motel

Why do we do this?

Is it just bad design through neglect?

Do we think we are smarter than our users?

Roaches users

can check in,

but they can’t

check out!

"Always leave the cage door open, so the bird can return“- Ancient Chinese proverb

Mistake 4: Making users do our data conversion dirty laundry

How do we get from A to B?

What job-seekers haveVisually formatted .doc

What recruiters wantSemantically structured .xml

Credit: http://flickr.com/photos/kafka4prez/

Do you…?

A. Spend money on some parsing software to do the conversion automatically?

B. Invest in a massive data entry team to do it manually?

C. Be lazy and just force the user do it?

Dice.com profile creation1. Profile name

6. Resume

2. Profile Details 3. Desired Position 4. Experience 5. History

7. Preview & Post 8. 3rd party upsell 9. Confirmation

Frustration meter

With CV parsing software this could be reduced to:

Step 1: upload your CVStep 2: …there is no step 2.

Frustration meter

It’s a false economy

• User Experience improvements cost money, but avoiding them is a false economy.

• The longer and more tedious a user journey, the higher the drop out rate.

• Your UX is your conversion rate which in turn is your revenue stream!

It’s a false economy

• When sampa.com removed a single form field from a user journey, their conversion rate went up almost 10%

It’s a false economy

• When topix.net removed an entire page from a user journey (forum posting), they found their conversion rate went up 10 times.

• 10 times!!!

How can you avoid making UX mistakes on your recruitment site?

Hopefully by now I’ve got you fired up about UX.

Perhaps, you’re a job board owner, and you’re thinking of correcting these problems when you get back to the office next week.

Want my advice? Don’t.

If you treat the symptoms, your problems wont go away

If your job board has issues like this, they are symptomatic of a deeper problem

Don’t rush to treat the symptoms – instead think about the underlying problem

If you treat the symptoms, your problems wont go away

If your organisation is not UX focussed, you will always be plagued by UX problems.

Some of the things you can do

UX training for everyone. At Madgex everyone, even the admin staff, receive regular training & workshops. Voluntary but fun – so everyone ends up attending.

Regular iterative user researchAt Madgex we are continually running research and tweaking our designs. An average study turns up 20-50 issues like the 5 we’ve looked at today.

Some of the things you can do

Most importantlyStand back and look at the way you run your business:

Question: Where is the user’s voice heard?

If the answer is not at your Board and Management team meetings every single week then you’re structured to fail in the medium to long term.

We/ You are well into the age of (conscious) user empowerment

Some things you shouldn’t do

Don’t just hire some UX people and hope they can solve everything

UX involves criticism and there has to be an openness to change – everyone in the organisation has to be UX oriented, not just your UX team

Some things you shouldn’t do

DON’T separate your UX team from your design team• Outsourcing your research to a dedicated UX consultancy is tempting...• But it introduces a gap between research and design / development• Important lessons will inevitably fall through the cracks, and you will

loose UX momentum between research projects.

• By all means engage with UX consultancies but beware!

ConclusionsOut with the old

UX work is seen as •Time consuming•Costly•Mandated but frustrating•Endless!

In with the new!

• Staff who find UX issues are rewarded

• Everyone receives regular UX training

• Everyone cares about it, regardless of position

Alternative solution (and shameless plug)

On the other hand, you could avoid all this hassle and licence the Madgex V3 job board platform.

We are a UX centric organisation – our new platform covers all the issues we’ve talked about today, plus lots more that we’re keeping under wraps for now!

www.madgex.com

Thanks for listening

Questions