Magnet.me UX Research and Design Strategy.
The challenge was to bring the user back in the processes of the product team.
For 1.5 years I worked for Magnet.me as a UX strategist and UI designer.
Bring back the user. The company (mainly founders and product team) were focused solely on quantitative data.
They measured how users reacted on new features, but lacked insight (thus made assumptions) into why users were not searching as much or how to get their interactions up in an effective way.
UX research and journey mapping. I set-up in depth user research, sourcing from the userbase. And asked the founders and product team (developers and designers) to observe in the interviews.
Through 21 interviews, of each one hour, I developed 3 journeys.
- Student who is looking for internship
- Student who is looking for first job
- Young professional who is looking for next job
Based on these journeys UX/UI opportunities were identified. Read more about these design improvements here.
After participating in the interviews the team was convinced that more user involvement was needed to keep on improving their product at rapid speed.
What data could'nt tell them. The team had been staggered and split about interfaces A and B for almost a year. They had been running split test for over 6 months, but got no conclusive answer.
Through usability testing we got a very surprising answer.
We discovered that 5/6 users who got interface A developed had hacks to get to interface B. They logged out and went to the public website, went into incognito mode, or had the HTML address saved that showed interface B.
Everyone was stunned. No metric could have indicated this. As only logged in users would enter split testing.
So, no surprise, we decided on interface B.
Snippet of student journey.
B2B UX. The platform had a student and a recruiter interface. Also here good UX research was neglected and sales was expected to give the right insights.
But the collaboration between the sales and product team was diminishing and there was even a lot of friction. Sales grew angry and developers annoyed.
I set-up B2B interviews to get insight into the journey of a recruiter/client and identify pain points.
- 3 interviews start-up companies recruiters
- 2 interviews medium enterprises recruiters
- 3 interviews corporate recruiters
Onboarding recruiters. One of the main insights from these interviews was the steep learning curve the recruiters had to face in our product. And how little support we were giving.
Thus the first activity was to improve the e-mail onboarding flow and increase the frequency of emails. Next to this the main interface was tackled.
In this design I supported the UI designer with input and guidance.
Sales and Product collaboration. Next to this I had a session to gain insight into the friction between the developers and sales.
After this session we decided on two activities:
1. feature request list that was open to all of th sales team.
2. bi-weekly meetings with main stakeholders from sales and design to discuss the feature request list.
In this way we could use the input from sales effectively, help sales understand the development priorities better and prevent the developers from being distracted with non-urgent questions.