Sept 07, 2022
My Role
Product Designer — Product Strategy, User Flows, Prototyping, Visual Design
Team
Himanshu Singh, POD Lead
Prakash Singh, PM
Manas Mohapatra, SDE
Kaavya Jeevakumar, PD
Duration
March 2023 - Sept 2023
Overview
Ever since Apna started, its primary mode of registration for job-seekers was through its Android app, i.e. candidates could apply to jobs only through our Android app.
While this was a good way to start for the audience we were catering initially. With apna’s evolving business needs/model, we needed to increase its TOFU by giving a holistic Job Application experience through both app & web.
Thus, in this project we discuss how we built the 'Job Application' on web from scratch & thereby enabling millions of professionals to apply & register their profiles through web.
The backstory - how this all started?
<add stats - 80% users dropped after applying to a job on web>
Apna has been one of the largest blue-collar jobs platform. Owing to our initial research insights & our users' practical feasability , we never felt the need to enable the 'Job Application Portal' on web, i.e. it was just the Android app through which candidates could apply to jobs.
While it worked well initially, but as the business wanted to scale in terms of having more skilled & educated job-seekers on board for leads given to HRs, it faced a severe crunch.
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The company-wide restructuring took place to re-position itself as a collar-less job marketplace, in terms of audience we would be targetting & this is how 'Growth' vertical came to existence.
Our primary job was to help increase the revenue funnels for the company. Increasing the TOFU on our website by re-designing our website & enabling the job application through web was our biggest Growth Experiment; At the same time, our Employers Team made sure that our marketplace is filled with openings once professionals from diverse roles are in,
This was the most straight-forward problem statement I've ever worked on
We needed more job-seekers & we needed it quick - that's it!
It was almost 2 years since our web portal was last developed/ tweaked. Thus, we were required to try every possible experiment & initiative (even if it was from scratch) that could bring us more candidates registering on our portal.
Enabling our 'Job Application Portal' on web was one of such problems we worked on…
We were analysing the scope of the task when we found…
Both our website & our web job portal were Live, but both posed a significant challenge in itself:
Challenge Set 1: Regarding website:
Lack of visually appealing minimal look. It was last updated an year back. SInce then our design system was also completed.
Lack of Unique Value Proposition: The current home page does not effectively communicate our unique selling proposition (USP) and divides the messaging across multiple aspects.
Outdated and Irrelevant Information: The website contains outdated or irrelevant information that needs to be removed or updated.
Evolving Offerings: Our offerings have changed over time, but the current home page does not reflect these changes, leading to confusion among users
Challenge Set 2: Regarding web job portal
Our web portal was nothing more than a catalogue
It did showcased all the jobs available in our database, but on applying to them, it showed a dialog box with QR asking users to scan & download the Apna's android app.
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IT WAS A BAD EXPERIENCE IN SO MANY WAY!
Peaking the excitement of a user before dropping it significantly
The compulsion to download the app further acted as a resistance
It creates a bad perception in the users mind for the brand overall
We even validated our claim through our metric analysis tool
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This is when we devised this plan…
Too many problems to solve; the requirement was to do it ASAP! The product stakeholders were still fighting for the prioritisation, so to ease them I decided to list it on Kano model. I shortlisted all pointers that would help in the immediate future clubbed them into phases.
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Seeing our business priority, we prioritised our phases:
Phase 1: Enabling the Job Application (0 to 1)
Phase 2: Website re-design
Phase 3: Re-designing he Job Feed & improving it's filtering experience
<Oopar ke phases ko 3 horizontal blocks mein daalna hai w/ detail points unke andar>
<Add a flow -wise diagram, with timelines ki pehle phase 1 kiya fir wapas jake job feed re-design kiya (jaise floward mein banaya tha), also showing kaya meine kaam kiya, kaha se anjali ka shuru hua>
Since our initial explorations were quick & dirty, we couldn't leverage the users feedback loops & often had to take gut call/ assumprtions & took the designs to show them to our members from other teams & observed their reactions. We broadly followed a lean startup design process
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First mention the lean UX design process - experiment, launch, learn
Phase 1 begins: Application flow
Analysing the current flow:
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Designs were not updated as per our Design System
There was no concept of user profile being built
The application flow was missing
Addressing the problems 1 by 1:
Phase 1. task 1 - Not every element on the old design was to be used, IIdentified the elements that would be used further & then re-designed them
<Add glimpses of Before -after>
Phase 1, task 2 - We further sub-divided this task into 2 part based on the user type:
Users who already had their account on Apna app & just wanted to login on web
Users who didn't have an account on Apna
<Add glimpses of Before -after>
Phase 1, task 3 -
Phase 2 begins: Website re-design
Analysing the current designs:
Designs were not updated as per our Design System
A lot of services featured were not functional
UX issues mentioned in the figma file
<Add a slideshow showing the current images - old designs >
After several rounds of discussion with both the Founder's team & the Marketing team, we came up with 5 broad offerings that the Apna as a brand wanted to focus on:
Add offerings along with the design explorations & the final design that was finalised
