daigo.org

It is here. The New and Improved BostonWorks.com. This is what I was working on the last 4 month or so, I am very relieved, and excited, to have finished it. Here, you can see the old BostonWorks screen shot.

It was such an unique and great learning experience, I wanted to write it done and not forget the experience. So, here are my personal notes for the thought process of the redesign (so probably won’t make sense for anyone else…)

• First I analyzed other similar “job sites.” I’ve crawled the web and put them in my del.icio.us links. And took note what I liked (or didn’t like) from personal user point of view.
• It was fun figuring out how job seekers (the targeted users for this redesign) are actually using the site, and redesign the whole user experience (UX) based on what people already do on the site - and enhance their experience. Looking at stats/click-map that was collected via Omniture, we found that a lot people who goes to the homepage search for job (doh) but the search function was somewhat hidden, so we brought that up right in front. We also gave users “5 methods” that they can use to navigate the jobs within the site (Find a job by: Region/Town, Commute, Job Title, Employer, or Industry). Those methods are repeated over and over in throughout the site.
• We also divided our content into two parts, (ad turned out to be it was our tag line): (1) The jobs you want. and (2) and how to get them. Once we figured this out, all the content fell pretty cleanly into places.
• Next we figured out what action we want to encourage users to take: on this product, we decided Search, Learn, Post, and Interact, as 4 main actions. Homepage needed to encourage all of those in the limited space, and accommodate more ad positions. The redesigned site added two new prime ad positions.
• BostonWorks is also a weekly section in the Boston Globe. So the site will have fresh “work” related editorial content every week. This puts BostonWorks very unique position compare to its competitors, such as Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs etc. (see my del.icio.us jobsites tag for a list that I compiled). As the economy turn around and more company starts to hire, and it becomes job seekers market, reaching out to more “passive” job seekers is important.
• The key objective that we wanted to achieve in the redesign was to cross promotion with in the sites. We have implemented a bottom of the page site nav, and search box on top of the right hand side of every page within. This is attempt to invite fore-mentioned “passive” job seekers to use our job finding tools that is available to them. Also having well organized and intriguing bottom nav/sitemap will help users find what they are looking for more easily. Having consistent bread crumbs thought out the site is also help users understand where they are within the site.
• One of the more fun things in the site is “Industry channel”. for example, there is a Biotechnology channel in the site. This is our attempt to personalize the content suited to the professionals within the industry s/he works in. Pre-redesign site can be seen here. I found those Royalty Free images from Getty.
• After the beta site was made we conducted a user test at the Copley Focus Center with a firm in NYC. That was very interesting, to be behind a mirrored glass. A lot of test results are what I expected, but many little improvements are made after the user test.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 07/28/2006 @ 11:01 am and is filed under Web/Print Design and Dev. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.