Introduction
Within last few years, Handshake has become the leading early career community in the US helping millions of students to find a job of their dreams and simultaneously helping employees find suitable candidates. In this product analysis, I have made an attempt to analyze pain points and suggest redesigns to resolve practical problems of product development, identify user patterns and behaviors while building the product.
01 Heuristic Analysis
Visibility of system status
The website keeps the user informed of the status of their request or action. For example, after a user logs in and uploads a document, a status message as highlighted yellow in the image below is shown about the progress of upload.
Similarly, if a document is deleted, a confirmation message as shown (bottom right) in the image below is displayed to update the user that the action has been completed.
02 Match between system and the real world
The user interface has multiple elements which resemble the real world. For example, on the user’s profile page if the profile photo is missing, a camera icon is shown to indicate that a picture is required in that section. Similarly, a pen/pencil icon is shown next to the sections that can be edited connecting to the real world where a pen/pencil is used to write/modify something.
But, the same feature is not available for all the sections for incidence, the Work Experience section. There is an option to ‘Add Work Experience’ but no icon/option to indicate that it is editable. Instead when the user clicks on this section it becomes editable which is confusing for a user.
03 User control and freedom
The website adheres to consistency heuristic when compared with other similar sites like LinkedIn, Indeed etc. For example, the icon for editing content across the website is an icon of pen/pencil which is the same as other websites.
04 Error Prevention
For each job opening based on the user profile, a message is displayed below the ‘Apply’ button indicating if all the requirements for the job are being met by the user or not. This prevents the user from applying to a job if he/she doesn’t meet the required criteria.
When a system user is applying for a job, ‘External Application’ button (bottom right) gets enabled only after all the mandatory documents are uploaded thus preventing a user from submitting an incomplete application.
05 Recognition rather than recall
Website navigation is clear and concise for the user. Visual cues are visible on the profile for example if there is a new message received or if unread notifications are there. A number in red pops up against that element to capture the user's attention.
Another example can be an information display if a role fits the university the student is from to inform students if a job opening is preferable or not. For example, in the image below it shows ‘Great for School of Information Sciences’ while for some jobs no such message is shown.
06 Flexibility and efficiency of use
The website provides a lot of features to the user but doesn’t have the provision of performing any action using shortcuts. A user has to click on options to take any action and navigate around.
07 Aesthetic and minimalist design
The website has incorporated this heuristic as the design is minimalist with a clear emphasis on the elements of importance for the customer base it is designed for. It doesn’t look cluttered and all the options are tactfully placed across. The task bar options are of appropriate size and on top to be visible at first glance to the user.
Also, a direct link on the landing page to visit the career center of the university the student belongs to is also very helpful. A user doesn’t have to scroll to find these elements of importance when landing on the website for finding a job.
08 Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
As of now, there is no provision of allowing users to recover from an error on the site.
09 Help and documentation
The ‘Help’ option is available to provide support to the logged in users of the website - Students and Employers. The option is not available on the home page or the task bar but can be found when the user clicks on the profile icon.
For users who aren’t logged in and are just visiting the website, ‘Overview’ and ‘How it Works’ options (highlighted in blue in the image below) are shown on the home page to familiarize them with the purpose of the site and how to use it.
01 Removal of the popup that appears on click of Apply Externally button
When the user clicks on the Apply Externally button, a popup shown in the image above appears where based on the requirements of the company, the user is asked to first upload Resume, Cover Letter or Transcript before being redirected to the application on the companies web portal.
Design rationale:
This is particularly confusing for a user because the button ‘Apply Externally’ gives an idea that you’ll be redirected to the external application but instead you get a popup. Also, this feature isn’t feasible because uploading documents in the popup window and then doing the same on the company’s career portal results in redundancy of steps for a user.
02 Make filters more accessible and relevant
The way the existing filters available on the Handshake
website are leveraged isn’t very user friendly.
On clicking on ‘Filters’ , a popup window loads with filters
categorized into multiple headings. After selecting the
filters of choice when the user closes the window,
on the main page nowhere the selected filters are shown
for reference of the user. In case a user wants to confirm
if the filtered results are as per his/her selection of
filters, they need to open the filters’ popup window again
and this makes the entire process cumbersome.
DESIGN RATIONALE
Our final redesign for this feature suggests that the
selected filters should be shown on the main page with a
provision to directly remove certain filters if needed
(as shown in the image above on the right). This will help
the users to easily add or remove certain filters from the
main page itself if they intend to change their
search results.
03 Progress Bar to show application fill status
Currently, there is no such provision for the user but only an
option to mark Yes or No to confirm if they have
submitted the application externally.
DESIGN RATIONALE
It’ll be extremely helpful for the users to have a progress
bar as shown in red in the image above to know how many
steps of the application have they finished, what each step is
and how many more are left in order to complete the application.
04 New folder feature to allow users to add customized documents or multiple documents with the same name
Users need to be able to upload resumes, cover letters with the same name format with the content customized to suit the job description. This saves student’s time. Currently, this Add New Folder button/feature does not exist. In our earlier assignment we planned on adding a new folder button on the “My Documents” screen. In this iteration we have modified the previous prototype to a newer screen where we add the “add new folder” button in the latter screen where the user actually uploads the document.
DESIGN RATIONALE
We have drawn inspiration from Google Drive - which allows users to select whether they want to upload a new file or new folder. This ensures consistency and reduces user discovery. Users generally transfer past knowledge to new contexts as they navigate through newer features of the application. It will help reduce user frustration.
05 New folder feature to allow users to add customized documents or multiple documents with the same name
In this feature, the user goes to the profile where we see multiple tabs like My Documents, My Jobs etc. We can add a new tab called My Dashboard and include the above screen. Actually currently there exists a tab called My Jobs where we can see pending, reviewed and declined jobs. This data can be leveraged to the new feature we are proposing.
DESIGN RATIONALE
We plan on adding this dashboard as a new tab under the user profile - as each user wants to keep a track of the job applications. There are many steps to applying for a job - like uploading resume, uploading transcripts and then navigating to external link to complete applying etc, users can procrastinate a step and then forget about it later therefore it was necessary to add a dashboard to help users introspect as to how many pending application one has.
06 Better error messages
One major issue that we observed while using handshake was generic error messages. For example, when we upload a document with the same name as the one file exists in “My Documents” we get the error message as “oops..something went wrong”. We replaced error messages with more helpful ones pointing to the exact error occurred.
DESIGN RATIONALE
Having read week 2 reading article https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/, we were able to pin point issues with the error messages and develop a prototype to add more helpful error messages. Messages like “something went wrong” is extremely generic and confusing for users. This message can mean many things - server is down, the file format is incorrect, the file size is too large etc. So therefore we proposed a change in error messages with more helpful ones.
