Waterlooworks Redesign
Overview
Students and employers alike are familiar with WaterlooWorks, the University of Waterloo’s online recruiting system.
Although being successful in employing thousands of UW students every recruiting term, Waterlooworks possesses the unintuitive UI typical to enterprise software where the people who buy aren't the same people that use it.
Here's my take on how it could be improved.
My contribution
User research Product design
The team
Solo
Year
2021
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User Research
The primary method of data collection was a survey posted on a University forum/online community, as the majority of students are current Waterlooworks users. The goal of this research was to pinpoint the issues users were experiencing in order to address them in the redesign. Link to survey here
Research Insights
An Affinity Map was created in order to summarize the findings and create design actions for them. At a high level, the majority of users expressed frustration at the difficulty of navigating the Waterlooworks UI, in addition to seeing irrelevant positions when searching for postings to apply for.
The major areas of concern include:
- User Interface People were frustrated about the unnecessary complexity or the user interface
- Job searching It was difficult and time consuming to search for job postings due to irrelevant listings and unreliable searching/filtering.
User Persona
From the user survey, there were trends/patterns in how students searched for jobs, usually depending on their year of study and experience. The redesign would need to accommodate both user’s methods and preferences when job searching.
Design Process
User flow (Simplified)
The site architecture was modified in a way to create greater ease of accessibility and more intuitive navigation, and was mapped out on a high-level user flow.
Turning Insights Into Design Ideas
Dashboard
- Dashboard was entirely redone to only include relevant and useful information. The main element remaining was the “Upcoming Interview Schedule” as survey showed that most students found it the most/only useful part of the current dashboard.
- A pain point was users expecting interview messages were often disappointed with instead receiving frequent irrelevant messages from CECA. Redesign separates alerts from messages to address this.
- Posting cycle time tracker- new feature as previously cycles were only known by visiting an external website. Occasionally students would forget when a cycle would end and loose opportunities to apply for postings.
- Reminders section on dashboard allows for convenient access to forms and documents needed to be filled. Previously, students found it difficult to locate and navigate form locations.
- Job posting status simplified- current statuses are overly complex and numerous due to being shared with both students and employers.
Job Search
- # Openings was intentionally omitted from the redesign as it tended to be inaccurate, employers typically hiring as many or as few candidates as they wished based on applicant performance.
- Salary is an added category for job postings as it was weighted highly in what applicants considered when applying. Previously, there was no way to determine job posting salary apart from being occasionally listed in posting descriptions.
- Posted Date is an added category allowing applicants to sort by newest and oldest postings, as research found that users found the “NEW” tag feature unreliable.
- Posting ID removed as it adds unnecessary noise.
- Additional “tags” for things such as additional posting requirements (cover letter, external application, etc.) added for easy filtering, and was weighted highly in what applicants considered when applying. Previously unable to be filtered and only seen in detailed posting view.
- Filtering allows students to see which skills, locations, etc. are the most frequent in job listings.
User Testing
The prototype was tested on University of Waterloo students that were current users of Waterlooworks.
Overall test users responded positively, participants tended to highlight the tracking application rejections and filter by salary feature when asked what stood out as useful about the design. Additionally, there were no issues with navigation, with participants welcoming the simpler interface. UI specific feedback included adding the “Apply” shortcut button back to the postings listings.
Outcome
Reflection
Value of User Research: Due to my own experience as a user, I expected to be able to predict the majority of issues that would be found from user research. In reality, the unique experiences of test participants allowed them to identify several pain points and offer suggestions that I had not anticipated, such as ics. export for interview times. Additionally, many participants were experienced in software design and development themselves due to the demographic covered in the survey, and offered their own ideas of how to improve the product.
However, the advantage of being a user myself did allow me to identify subtleties that would be difficult to uncover through user research. For example, I often checked Waterlooworks daily to see if applications for postings I was interested in had already chosen their interview candidates. For this reason, I included a counter that would allow a user to see how many applications they had were still viable directly on the dashboard.