The startup I worked for, Careerimp, was bought out by Professional Diversity Network specifically to redesign their product. Professional Diversity Network runs a variety of diversity talent sites that focus mainly on job searching and networking.
The majority of planning, UX/UI & visual design was done by me, but my direct supervisor did play a big role in the development of the project.
Disclaimer: Not all of the styling has been implemented as intended on the sites. Internal development problems that prevented the site from performing its main functions had taken precedence over the fining tuning of the styling. Before the problem was solved I had taken a new at another company.
The old interface was littered with unnecessary content that users weren't actively using. Instead spam accounts were being created to post blogs and updates. So the first step of this project was to decide what content and features were the cores of the service and minimize down to those.
The decision was also made to have the site be responsive, and that we would plan it out mobile first. All the planning of content and wireframes were initially done for the mobile platform.
Skeletons for how the information and layouts should adapt for desktop and tablet were created. Since mobile first was still fairly new and a fluid process, a lot of adjustments were made on the fly to best optimize for those platforms. Based on how the content adjusted on those platforms, we ended up refining some of the layout through this process.
I also wrote users tests. We used the think aloud method to test. In the method you create a list of tasks for the user to complete, and have them speak their thoughts about the process out loud. We ran about 3 per round and did 3 rounds total at various points in development. The first round was after content was generated on an early beta version of the site, and later ones once when we had made significant changes. Most of our feedback from the tests related to labeling of content.
The decision was also made to have the site be responsive, and that we would plan it out mobile first. All the planning of content and wireframes were initially done for the mobile platform.
Skeletons for how the information and layouts should adapt for desktop and tablet were created. Since mobile first was still fairly new and a fluid process, a lot of adjustments were made on the fly to best optimize for those platforms. Based on how the content adjusted on those platforms, we ended up refining some of the layout through this process.
I also wrote users tests. We used the think aloud method to test. In the method you create a list of tasks for the user to complete, and have them speak their thoughts about the process out loud. We ran about 3 per round and did 3 rounds total at various points in development. The first round was after content was generated on an early beta version of the site, and later ones once when we had made significant changes. Most of our feedback from the tests related to labeling of content.
content planning sketch
wireframes for all menu options when logged in
detailed wireframes for logged in jobs area
