Apply Wiz

Project Summary

Girl Develop It (GDI) is an organization whose mission is to create welcoming, supportive opportunities for women and non-binary adults to learn software development skills. They believe in a world where all people are included and empowered in developing the future of technology. Through classes, projects, and events, GDI students develop code, confidence, and community.

Essteem engages companies and talent for social & environmental responsibility and innovation.

GDI and Essteem partnered together for a Women’s History Month hackathon. GDI wanted hackathon participants to create a web application that helps their students search for jobs, apply to them, and develop their network for their next career move.

Problem Statement

Many developers, designers, and data scientists do not want to spend their time searching and applying to open job roles. They would like to pay for a service that searches and applies to roles they’re qualified for so that they can spend their time working at their current jobs or learning new skills & developing their portfolios.

GDI & Essteem needed help to bring their conceptual idea of an app called "Apply Wiz” to fruition.

The Solution

Create a web application where the job seekers can share their job preferences, HR freelancers search and apply to jobs for job seekers, and Apply Wiz administration can cross reference, all on the same platform. Job seekers will also have the option to either apply to roles that are a match by themselves or have the HR freelancers apply on their behalf.

Design Team

 

  • Jennifer Susan, Software Engineer

  • Melanie Richard, Software Engineer

  • John Liu, Data Scientist

  • Abrar Sawani, UX/UI & Resersearch Designer

  • Dona Das, UX/UI & Resersearch Designer

  • Robert Chacon, UX/UI & Resersearch Designer

 

My Contributions

 

  • Competitive & Comparative Analysis

  • User Flow

  • Design System - Components

  • Mid Fidelity Mockup

  • High Fidelity Mockup

 

Tools Used

 

Duration

 

  • Figma

  • Figjam

 

  • 1 week = 3 days to design, 4 days for developers and data scientist

Challenge Faced Throughout the Project

 

3 days to design

Being that this was my first hackathon, I was not used to the short time we had to design and develop a new app. I would have loved to have more time to do more user research and usability testing.

To mitigate this challenge, the design team created a timeline of what we wanted to accomplish for each day:

  • Day 1: Competitive & Comparative Analysis and sketched wireframes

  • Day 2: Mid - Fidelity Mockup and usability testing

  • Day 3: Iterate design based on user feedback, create style guide, and high fidelity mockup

The design team was able to stick to this timeline and deliver a high fidelity mockup on time for the developers and data scientist to begin to do their work.

Personas

GDI & Essteem provided the hackathon teams with 3 different users that they want Apply Wiz to target.

  • Job Seeker

    Nicole Jackson recently completed GDI’s User Experience Program and is pivoting from accounting to UX Design. She wants to find a service that searches and applies to design roles that are a great fit so that she can concentrate on learning new design skills and developing her portfolio.

  • HR Freelance

    Darius does freelance work for Apply Wiz. His responsibilities include being the first contact call with the job seekers, apply to jobs for job seekers, source job postings, and enter job posting info into a database. He needs a user-friendly dashboard to track companies, open positions, and talent info.

  • The Administrator

    Samantha is an administrator at Apply Wiz. She needs access to a dashboard to verify the work the HR Freelancers have completed. She needs a way to sort through the work completed and leave comments when needed.

Competitive & Comparative Analysis

 

Job Seekers

We wanted to gather additional information on what features competitors have within their applications/websites and what is missing or could be improved upon.

Competitive & Comparative Analysis for the Job Seeker key takeaways:

  • The majority of competitors have both a free option and an option to upgrade for premium features

  • Reviews of company and follow-up rates are rare across the board

The HR Freelancer

Competitive & Comparative Analysis for The HR Freelancer key takeaways:

  • The majority of competitors have some sort of onboarding questionnaire the job seekers complete so the company has the needed relevant information

  • Very few include job seeker recommendations (previous coworkers writing recommendations of the job seeker)

Task Flow

Due to the short time frame we had to complete this project, our team decided to focus on the flows for Job Seeker and HR Freelancer. We didn’t create one for the Administrator persona because GDI & Essteem wanted them to have the same dashboard as the HR Freelancer.

We needed to consider the best and shortest path for each flow to design before starting our wireframe sketches to brainstorm solutions.

 

Job Seeker

 

HR Freelancer & Administrator

Sketches and Mid-Fi Prototype

Once our group had created the user flows, we were then able to create sketched wireframes to get an idea of how the Apply Wiz app could look like. From there, we then created a mid-fi prototype.

Usability Testing

Because we only had 3 days to design, the designers didn’t have enough time to do more than one phase of usability testing. We were able to have 3 users test this app and provide feedback. The tasks and results are as follows:

 

Tasks

  • Task 1: Create an account

  • Task 2: View one of your top job matches

Results

  • Success rate of completing tasks in under 5 minutes was 100%

  • Success rate of completing task was 100%

Iteration #1

The following was the concern users expressed while trying to complete the tasks:

  • Onboarding Questionnaire Completion Not Clear: After users were done with answering the onboarding questionnaire, they were then taken to their profile homepage that had jobs that would be a great fit for them. 2 out of the 3 users weren’t sure if they had completed the questionnaire or if they had jumped a screen. To solve this confusion, the design team implemented an overlay that let’s the users know that they have completed the questionnaire.

 
 

Style Guide

The brand colors for Apply Wiz were inspired by the GDI and Essteem’s brand colors.

We also created a components library to ensure that our work was consistent and efficient throughout the app design.

High Fidelity Mockup

Based on the usability feedback we received from users, we were able to implement changes and create the high fidelity mockup below. Please feel free to click through the mockup using this link.

 

Next Steps

During the hackathon presentation, our group of designers recommended GDI to explore the following options for future iterations:

  • Do another round of usability testing for the updates made on iteration #1 and implement user feedback

  • Add push notifications to alert job seekers of new job matches

 

Hackathon Results

Our design for Apply Wiz earned 1st place in the hackathon and our developers’ open source code is currently being worked on. I was also nominated by my teammates as Design Expert and Research Expert!