🎯 About

During my studies, I became familiar with the entire design process, using

the task at hand, the tools I learned and the design methodology based on

based on UX best practices.

I carried out the topic in a team of three together with other students in cooperation with a business partner who enabled us to work on a real design problem.

💎 Topic and Business Partner Collaboration

Our business partner, the Billennium company - reported that every time, during internal recruitment for leadership positions, HR staff face a with the difficulty of finding suitable candidates.

Instead of just passively waiting for recruitment applications, they would like to identify a group of company employees interested in this line of development, in order to facilitate their promotion to their dream positions, on the one hand, and speed up the process, on the other.

🔍 Work Scope

We divided the work on our project into three stages of Learn, Design and Measure in which we went through the steps in our design process.

The Learn stage involved consulting with the business partner and getting to know the of its organizational structure. Identifying the research problem and the specifics of recruiting people for leadership positions in the IT industry.

For this, we used a number of design tools and research methods:

We selected the recruiters using the key of diversity and experience: we spoke with an in-house recruiter who works for one company (Billennium), recruiters working for an agency, "on loan" to IT companies for a longer, exclusive contract, an agency recruiter working on contract for start-ups, and an IT recruiter working for a multinational corporation.

💡 Challenges and Conclusions

• There is no permanent process for collecting information about individuals who would like to develop in leadership directions and are seeking promotion in this area.

• There are no processes that allow such individuals to be consulted and receive feedback or gain leadership competencies under the guidance of more experienced employees.

• There is a lack of a tool from which, in a non-committal way an employee could learn about what a leader's job entails.

• Candidates for Leaders often have a misconception or fear that a career change from experienced programmer to team manager will be a regression rather than a promotion.

👥 Persons: mapping user characteristics

Based on in-depth interviews, by mapping behavioral differences and demographic characteristics to better understand the diversity of needs, behaviors and goals of users of our solution, we created four personae.

Two for recruiters and two for leaders.

🚗 Customer Journey Map

We have developed two Customer Journey Maps. One for the recruiter and one for the potential leadership candidate. We did this in order to more fully understand the company's current recruitment process from both the perspective of the recruiter and the leadership candidate.

🖼 Value Proposition Canvas

A very helpful tool was the Value Proposition Canvas, through which we brainstormed all the benefits, tasks, pains as well as ideas for solving our design problem.

We formulated proposals for solutions and values that our product should contain to meet our main goal of improving the recruitment process.

📸 Competitor analysis

In the next step, we analyzed various existing apps and platforms on the market for recruiting, information gathering and creating employee databases designed for HR departments.

We also reviewed apps that use fun elements for educational purposes as a casual and lightweight form of information delivery, fostering more effective learning and user engagement.

🚀 Design definition

Based on all the previous steps, acquired knowledge and experience in the learn stage, we formulated our design definition to clearly delineate the scope in which we will move in the design stage:

📝 Job Stories i User Stories

Work on the Design stage began with preparing User and Job Stories. This allowed us to identify the most important needs of users: both recruiters and employees aiming for leadership positions.

📈 Kano models

Based on an earlier brainstorming on the main functionalities of our solution to prioritize functionalities, we used the Kano model. For us, solutions were more valuable the simpler they were to implement and the more they accelerated the recruitment process.

The second evaluative characteristic was whether functionalities could contribute to informing / educating about the role of a leader.

💵 MVP - Minimum Valuable Proposition

At this stage, we decided that the application would be divided into two separate panels: one for people who want to become leaders, and another for recruiters.

At the login stage, the application would recognize whether the email address used belongs to the recruiter or to other employees.

The division into two separate panels was due to the fact that these are two different groups of users with different goals and needs.

Despite the two separate panels, we enclosed the entire navigation in a coherent interface whose main navigational heart is the vertical side menu in which there are tabs referring to the various sections in the application.

🏄‍♀️ User flow

To gain the best understanding of the user's perspective, we also mapped out the User Flow. This allowed us to identify pain points that could lead to user frustration. We aimed to better design how different parts of the system interact and influence each other.

🗳 Design decisions

Our application would be provided by Billennium to its employees and then the use of employees' (often private) phones creates some reluctance. We approached our partner about this and determined that a RWD version integrated with a Microsoft account would be the best solution.

Dashboard

The main element is the dashboard - a general view where employees can see their basic data (directly fetched from the Billennium database during the first login). They also have the option to update their skills, professional experience, and choose their development direction. Additionally, through the statistics section, they can track their progress in the Quiz tab.

In the 'Your IT Path' section, we included a key switch from the perspective of building the candidate database - the 'I am interested in a new role' toggle. This allows recruiters to assess whether users are using the application merely out of curiosity or are genuinely expanding their knowledge to pursue new positions.

Quiz

Users can earn points that affect their ranking in the application. Points are awarded for correctly solving the Quiz and answering questions from the learning materials. The ranking is visible to the recruiter, allowing him to assess the employees' commitment to knowledge and helping to select the best candidates for recruitment.

Mentoring

The "Mentoring" tab is a list of people willing to share knowledge with less experienced colleagues. Next to a photo and a brief description of the mentors is a button that allows you to send them a personalized message via MS Teams, the company's main communication tool.

Sources

It is in this tab that you will find basic information useful for solving the Quiz. Among them are job descriptions and materials recorded by the company's employees - including special videos prepared by leaders in which they talk about their daily work. Another, source of information, is the AI chat, which uses materials implemented Billennium's database.

Career

The career tab informs the employee of upcoming recruitments, the links redirect to the Billennium site to the job posting tabs.

FAQ

In this section you will find the most frequently asked questions and answers regarding both how the application works and technical issues. In addition, AI chat equipped with implemented knowledge from the Billennium database, is ready to answer any question :)

Home Page Overview

In this tab, the recruiter can view general information such as aggregate statistics on employee activity/engagement, upcoming recruitments or has the option to save promising candidates to favorites.

User Base

A database of all people in various ways interested in leadership work. Appropriate filters allow the recruiter to search for people who declare their willingness to participate in recruitment, as well as those who are just gaining experience.

The recruiter has the option of both filtering out those who want to develop into a People Manager and those who prefer a technical leadership position.

Other filters will find the most active employees - those who have earned the most points in quizzes. Standard filters will allow you to search for an employee by currently held position and department.

Additional functionality of the database is the ability to efficiently generate a PDF and print a candidate's resume.

🧪 Usability Testing

The main objectives of conducting usability tests were

• To test the readability of text messages.

• To verify basic functionality for both groups of users

• To improve the readability of the design

After reviewing the prototype, we decided to modify the usability testing plan, which turned out to be too detailed. We focused on testing the most important functionalities of the project, paying particular attention to the naming of each section and the readability of messages, the visibility of buttons and the intuitiveness of the overall navigation.

Stage One: Pilot

We decided to test two non-Billennium employees as part of the pilot mainly due to concern about technical problems. An added benefit: already those who participated in the pilot identified areas for improvement, which were also confirmed by Billennium employees tested in the first round.

Stage two: Billennium employees

Due to the distinctive and airtight context of the application's use, we decided to explain to the test persons the situation in which they would use the designed solution and the task it would fulfill. During this stage, we conducted a total of 4 tests, yielding convergent conclusions. Thanks to them, we were able to identify areas requiring key changes.

Stage three: Billennium employees

After making the most important adjustments, we conducted the last two tests: with a recruiter and a Billennium serial employee. The areas where we made changes no longer generated the problems pointed out by earlier testers. Although we noticed elements for further improvement, we were able to eliminate the main pain points pointed out by the testers.

🌌 Conclusions from the usability testings

This was one of the more challenging stages in our entire design process. Attachment to our own solutions, which we spent a lot of time on, alters our perspective on the entire project, making it harder to maintain objectivity.

Test participants were eager to share their ideas for improving the application. Some of their suggestions aligned with our intuitions.

Each test participant brought their unique perspective, often surprising us with how different human perception can be. All opinions were taken into account in subsequent iterations, improving the quality of our solution.

Key takeway...

Despite my commercial experience and work as a UI/UX Designer prior to undertaking postgraduate studies in UX and Product Design at AGH, it was the first time I had the opportunity to comprehensively go through the entire design process from formulating the research problem to final testing, which rarely occurs in commercial work. (Usually, a designer is responsible for one segment of the entire design puzzle).

I also had the opportunity to confront my current toolkit and design methodology that I use daily with the best practices proposed by the university program.

Thanks to this experience, I found many helpful tools that I have already started to incorporate into my work methodology.

However, there were also elements in the teaching program for which I did not find application in the project discussed above, or I knew more effective design methods than those proposed during classes. However, there are no good or bad tools; everything depends on the user context and the design problem :)