Hingis Chang's Adventure

Overview

We first conducted a heuristic evaluation on the Indeed.com website in order to identify flaws and pain points across the site. From our heuristic evaluation results, we then decided to test the job searching user flow.

We ran usability testing on 10 participants to evaluate the efficacy of the site’s search filters. During user testing, the participants were asked to search for software engineering internships or full-time jobs on three different job seeking platforms: Indeed, Glassdoor, and LinkedIn. We provided each participant a persona with specified job preferences, such as location, dream companies, skill sets, and so on. However, the participants did not have to completely adhere to the persona’s identity while performing the job search task.This is so that we can observe the aspects that participants care about the most when it comes to job searching.

After the testing, we conducted quantitative and qualitative analysis based on the test results, and we identified potential problems as well as offered suggestions accordingly.

Heuristic Evaluation

Goal

Identify potential usability problems in Indeed’s official website on desktop device through Heuristic Evaluation.

Methodology

We followed Nielsen Norman Group’s 10 Heuristics for UI Design.

Heuristic Evaluation of Searching flow on Indeed.com

Summary

1. Areas of Improvement

Consistency and Standards
Buttons and phrasing styles are inconsistent across the website and this can cause confusion.

Visibility of System Status
The layout of some elements on the Indeed website are awkward and inelegantly laid out - this results in the suboptimal use of whitespace on the site

Flexibility and Efficiency of Use
The application format is restricted in many steps. Flexibility for customizing conditions for job seeking
and notification are limited.

2. Recommendations

Offer users the option to filter their actions
Give users the ability to filter the qualities of the job (pay, location etc.) that they are searching for on the
landing page as well as the type of job that they want to be notified through email for

Style site elements consistently across the site
Have elements such as buttons and suggestions be standardized across the site in order to minimize user
confusion or error

Methodologies

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Qualitative Analysis

We used affinity diagram on Figma to sort out the qualitative feedback we observed and got from user interview.

https://www.figma.com/file/Y3QOndib0gJUj9q3wDqHTs/Affinity-Diagram?node-id=0%3A1

Quantitative Analysis

SUS Score

Timing Analysis

Success Rate

Definition

Completely Success

Success rate = 100%
Found a job that totally fitted the requirements in the persona and expectation
Complete the task in 7 minutes

Partial Success

Success rate = 80%
Found a job that has no more than 3 differences from the requirements
Complete the task in 7 minutes

Failed / Timed out

Success rate = 0%
Failed to complete the task or found a job that has more than 3 difference
Does not complete the task in 7 minutes

Correlation between SUS and Easy Rate

Preference

Comparison

LinkedIn got the overall best performance, but Indeed has better success rate and same easy rate as LinkedIn.

Suggestions & Feedbacks

Positive Feedbacks

Clean and sleek UI
The filter is conspicuous & easy to access
Skill set filters - differentiator
No need to log in to search & access job opportunities

Negative Feedbacks

Search results do not match the filter
Job description can be organized better

Takeaways

First experience with a full-fledged UX research project for most of us
Became familiar with the research process and methodologies (benchmarking, heuristic evaluation, testing moderation etc.)
Preparedness - technical checks:
Often overlooked but a crucial part of of the usability testing process

Imperative to ensure that participants’ equipment is functioning properly & compatible with what we are having them user test
Also provides the opportunity for participants to ‘warm up’ to the process, making the actual user testing experience less intimidating

What we can improve

Randomize order in which participants test out sites: Avoid order bias - respondents tend to favor objects because of their position in a list or sequence. Objects in the front and back tend to be more memorable
Increase number of participants in our usability test - gain more statistically significant insights with larger sample size
Persona - participants struggled with the amount of information they were offered. We should make it more concise so as not to overwhelm participants with information that they feel obligated to use in the user testing

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Usability Study: Searching flow analysis