Project: Blue radar search feature redesign
overview
Blue Radar Search is a website that promotes job searching and networking aimed at collegiate coaches. For a semester-long project, our team was asked to analyze the website to gain a better understanding of why users were not fully completing their profile pages and imagine a more intuitive and incentivizing redesign to encourage users to finish setting up profiles upon visiting the site. | Link to InVision Prototype
Client
Blue Radar Search
Role
Concept Designer
UX Designer + Researcher
Deliverables
Research Insights
Clickable Prototype
Functional Code
Project Documentation
Duration
August 2019 - December 2019
(11 weeks)
Problem Statements
1. Blue Radar Search users are not completing their profiles which prevents them from yielding the full benefits of networking and job opportunities.
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2. Blue Radar Search has non-optimal profits on its Radar Scan feature because users not completing their profiles after registering.
Research
Comparative Analysis
We wanted to know what other websites and tools with similar functions were already on the market for users and how Blue Radar Search lined up with these platforms. The following are the companies we analyzed.
TASK Analysis
We needed to gain a better understanding of the intrinsic functions of Blue Radar Search and the current status, benefits, pain-points, and possible areas of improvement.
Contextual Inquiry
We desired to learn more about our target users and also wanted to observe how they interacted with the Blue Radar Search website in an organic environment. The following are quotes from our participants.
Research Insights
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There were many usability pain points in the flow of the original profile completion process such as the lack of immersive onboarding, the friction of having to leave the site to verify the account through the use of an external email, and the obscure location of the "sign up" button.
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Coaches who are currently satisfied with their jobs and positions may not finish setting up their profiles due to a lack of incentive. Coaches perceived that the only use of the site was job hunting.
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In the sign-up process, coaches found showing off connections to be important.
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Coaches neglected to fill out the "Specializations" field, despite these being important to Blue Radar Search's information database, from this we determined that the current flow may not have prompted coaches to see the benefit in providing specializations, or that they may not have understood what qualified as a specialization.
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There was a need for Blue Radar Search to market to less established coaches who could find use in the job searching attributes of the site, or give the site more features to incentivize older, established coaches to complete profiles.
Persona Creation
After analyzing our findings, we created personas to help synthesize our research and insights in order for us to move into the ideation phase.
"I wish there was a helpful way to grow and maintain my coaching network so that job searching was easier to manage."
"I have too many jobs to do with too little time to complete them all at 100%. I wish there was a quicker way to fill the position I need."
user flow
Going a step further, I created what we predicted to be a suitable flow for the new profile completion process that is fully based on insights from each key part of our research. This flow also considered requests from Blue Radar Search, such as placing an emphasis on the "specializations" field to that ensure users filled it out.
Ideation
The synthesis of all our research allowed the team to come up with actionable categories to ideate. We went into this phase with the knowledge that some of the categories for possible improvements to the Blue Radar Search website and profile completion flow were out of our direct scope for this project. Our intent was to come up with categories worthy of reimagination to hand off to Blue Radar Search for further betterment of the site, even after the project was complete.
Sketching
As Lead concept designer for this project, I oversaw the group's multiple ideation sprints and sketching activities. My goal here was to get the team thinking of "outside of the box" ways to liven up the very mundane and repetitive process of completing a profile online. By the end of our ideation phase, we had sketches for each of the following categories.
Final Design
Immediately after ideation, we narrowed down and refined sketches to move on to create mockups and the prototype of our final design. Each group member was given equal opportunity in choosing which sketches would be turned into final screens. Below is a brief overview of our final screens.
Evaluation
To evaluate our redesign, we simply wanted to determine if more users completed their profile after our redesign was implemented. We determined that our redesign was indeed successful in prompting more users to complete more of the Blue Radar Search profiles.
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Percentage of profile completed
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Time completion
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Usability/Development errors
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User Feedback
Metrics of evaluation