A user-centred view on how to leverage your assets

Dr. Harry Brignull, MadgexSimon Devitt, Haymarket

So, what are your assets?

Infrastructure

Staff

Products & Services

Financials (obviously)

Copyrights, trademarks,

patents

These are all important, but at the end of the day, they all boil down to one thing.

“This looks good ... I’ll use it.”

“... And if I like it, I’ll become loyal.”

Needs

Goals

Expectations

user Products / services

BrandPERCE

PTION

YOUR BRAND IS NOT YOUR LOGO• In mergers and acquisitions, companies are sold at many

times the value of their books.

• Why? Because the brand is valuable.

• And where does the brand exist?

Here.It emerges through the user’s experience with your product

Image credit: paulsobek, Flickr

Your users are your biggest assets

If you understand your users, you know how to move forward.

Case StudyMadgex ‘CV Search & Match’ design process

The opportunity space

Madgex is a digital recruitment platform provider

Our main offering is a white label job board platform

The opportunity space

• Job Boards are all about trying to grab the attention of potential candidates – but nowadays many employers already have their attention.

• A more efficient approach for those employers is to allow them to take their pick of the appropriate candidates and contact them directly.

• Targeted recruitment - not broadcast advertising

I’m talking about CV Databases.

The trouble is – they’re a dime a dozen!

Our challenge was to create one that’s radically more effective at meeting customer needs.

A traditional approach to design: - review your competitors - mix together their best features - add your own visual identity

16

Fingers crossed!

“Fingers crossed that when the system finally gets built, it meets our users needs, so it’s popular and we make money!”

That’s not smart – it’s much more effective to start with user needs, and reality check your ideas as they evolve.

Product concept & business objectives

The wrong approach: “outside in”

“Design” treated as a layer of decoration plastered on the outside

Read more: http://bit.ly/dansaffer

Implemented product

Iterative Wireframes & Prototypes

High level product idea & sketches

Business Objectives

User needs

The right approach: “inside out”

Start with user needs, then get designing

straight away.

The Madgex “inside out” design process

• Identify the broad opportunity space• Understand potential user base • Carry out contextual interviews• Elicit pain points, stopping points & complaints with status quo• Analyse findings to prioritise and clarify information into design goals

So we got in touch with our intended user base

The Direct Employer

The Recruitment Consultant

The Job Seeker

We interviewed them and watched them using existing products

• This was essentially an activity in looking for pain points

• What did they dislike about the status quo? What did they have trouble using?

• Simple approach: deep insights!

Recruitment Consultant pain point:Are these CVs fresh?

People change jobs all the time – but they don’t go back and update the CV database.

Our solution: make it super easy to update your CV’s status. Job seekers are reminded with periodical emails and can update with just one click.

And make it possible for recruiters to filter the CVs by freshness, e.g. “Only show me CVs that have been updated in the past two weeks”

Direct Employer pain point : I can’t buy something if I don’t know what I’m going to get!

With traditional CV databases, the employer can only see a very limited amount of information about the candidate before they buy access to the CV.

Recruitment consultants don’t have this problem – they will happily spend hundreds of pounds a month to have unlimited access to all the CVs in a database.

But this is a stopping point for direct employers. Why would they willing pay for an unknown commodity?

The Madgex solution

Show almost the entire CV before requiring payment

• How? By stripping out all personally identifying details

• Upon payment, the employer is shown the candidate’s name & contact details.

• This simple design change opens up the market to direct employers

Direct employers: a big revenue opportunity

• Direct employers account for up to 40% of job postings on some job boards

• As individuals they have low budgets – but there is a very large volume of them

• They are currently shut out of current commercial models because of the pricing structure.

A Job Seeker pain point

I’m highly employable – I don’t want pushy recruiters hassling me all the time!

• Recruiters assume that presence on the CV database implicitly means “Contact me anytime”

• This can overwhelm the most employable job seekers – causing them to opt out altogether!

The Madgex solution

Broker the initial conversation

If job seekers choose “case by case”, recruiters have to “request access” which sends them an email asking permission.

Again - once the problem was clearly articulated, the answer was in plain sight.

Job Seeker Complaint: Don’t make me retype my CV every time I want to register on a damn job site!

Image credit: wikipedia

Our solution: allow import and export

We allow users to import Word documents – or any page on the web!

We allow job seekers to export their CV in various formats and take it elsewhere

“Leave the cage door open and the bird will return” – Chinese proverb

Nobody was clamouring for these improvements

• The interviewees were capable of demonstrating the pain points but they weren’t able to articulate solutions

• They accepted the pain as just “the way things are”

• The pain points became our list of design challenges.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”- Henry Ford

This is the big take-home message for today: don’t just ask your customer base for their ideas for solutions. Interview them about their experiences, and observe them using competitor products.

Once the design problems are clearly articulated, your R & D team have the benefit of laser-like focus.

Cordis, a medical device manufacturer, used a very similar process to turn customer input into design.

In a three year period, their shares went from to $20 per share to $109 Read the Harvard Business Review case study here: http://bit.ly/cordis

You don’t just do this pre-launch- design is an ongoing process of iteration and optimization

Haymarket case studySimon Devitt Online Publishing Director

Haymarket Overview

• Historically a large proportion of profit has come from recruitment in our weekly magazines. Now a high proportion of our online revenue is coming from the jobsites.

• We started out using in-house developed jobsites with customised interfaces based on individual publishers opinions of how a good jobsite should work.

• We also realised that our sites were underperforming because of an inconsistent approach, poor SEO and poor User Experience

• We needed to move faster and establish a best of breed suite of functionality. We moved 11 existing jobsites to the Madgex platform and have launched an additional 8 new jobsites since.

BEFORE: AFTER:

On Third Sector, started with a basic job board platform in Nov 2006.

Limited features & usability became apparent .

We worked with Madgex to develop a custom version of their platform and

immediately saw improvements.

• Unique Users increased by 10%• Applications increased by 68%• Cost per acquisition reduced by over 50%

Stats Jan-Jul 08, generated through Hitbox

You MOT your car once a year – why not your user experience?

• Even though we were set up for SEO and usability, we didn’t want to tread water

• We wanted continuous, cyclical improvement - so we engaged in SEO analysis and UX research

• We wanted even more users arriving on the site, and even more staying and completing valuable activities.

In a typical UX MOT project, 18 hours of session footage is recordedThis is transcribed, tagged & analysed, then gets distilled into highlight videos.

A typical UX study produces 20-30 optimisation opportunitiesHere’s just a couple of them

Job Seeker Registration

Registration is a necessary stepping stone to indirect revenue generating activities like Email Alert setup and CV Publishing

Job Seeker Registration

Having filled in this form, users were taken to the following page...

In the research sessions, a few users became confused here because they

didn’t read the text.

After redesign We made some simple changes to the wording and layout to make it

clearer for “speed reading”

12% uplift in completed registrations

Comparing stats for April, May & June 2008 to the same months in 2009

Job Details & Application

Job Detail Page Job Application Page

In the research sessions, users would often go back to the job detail page, to gather details for their covering message. They found this back-and-forth frustrating.

Job Application PageWe added the job details to the application page, to make things

easier for them

Uplift in job applications on one jobsite from 2008 (before) to 2009 (after)

On average this gave a 51% uplift (though some credit must be attributed to changes in the economy)

A reduced number complete the activity they set out to do

Users start an activity, e.g.Apply for a job

Time investment:“How long is this going to take?”

Disorientation:“How do I proceed?”

Fatigue“This is tiring”

Cognitive overload“What does this all mean?”

Drop-outs

SEO increased

the number of users here.

User Experience Optimisation (UXO) reduced the leakage of users during

activities

Both SEO and UXO improved the

number of users who complete valuable

activities

50% reduction in PPC spend year on year

• Due to the implementation of these UX optimisations (≈ 25 in total)

• Partially attributable to the recession creating proactive job-seekers

Simon DevittHaymarket

Harry BrignullMadgex