Context
Employers who use Indeed for their job postings and campaigns have consistently requested a way to automate some of their daily tasks. This request emerged repeatedly through various conversations and research studies.
My Role
I led this project as the UX designer by reviewing past research, creating the project brief, and setting up and maintaining meetings with stakeholders for collaboration and review of workflows, designs, and prototypes. I started by creating a workflow that would influence the high-fidelity mocks. From there, I built out multiple scenarios to be used during user research sessions and built out the prototype. Throughout every step, I met regularly with my UX Lead and UX Researcher to gain feedback and ensure alignment.
Objective
The goal of this project was to initiate the design and research phases to understand how automatic actions would benefit users and how these actions could span multiple products. Due to the project's complexity and the number of Indeed products and teams it would impact, the plan was to break it into three research phases. Each phase would influence the next, allowing us to tackle more complex use cases and refine our prototype further.
Challenge
I encountered several challenges during this project. The first was the feature's complexity. I needed to scale the project back and understand who would benefit from this feature, why they would benefit, and how they would benefit. Instead of jumping into the toughest use case, I started with what the users already know. I utilized existing features that can be quite time consuming to use and explored automating it. Starting from that point provided a clear path forward for the team.
Another challenge was understanding each team's automation needs and how they function together or might negatively interact. We needed to develop a system that would prevent or notify users when conflicting automations are created. It quickly became clear that a landing page, permission levels, and a backend system would be needed to help users successfully use this feature.
Strategy
The strategy for this project was to break the research study into three phases:
Phase One:
This phase started with a simplified approach that gave users the option to automate an existing feature and see how that automation would play out during a campaign creation task. This allowed us to ground the research study and not overwhelm participants. It also helped validate the need for an automation feature spanning multiple Indeed products. For this part of the study, I identified research questions and created and high-fidelity prototype to aid our UX Researcher, who I collaborated with throughout the project.
Context: A campaign is created when one or more jobs posted on Indeed is given money to enhance performance and reach more job seekers.
Phase Two:
In this phase, we started to explore specific automations that would benefit users. The workflow, influenced by initial and past research, was created. Here, I explored the specific automations we wanted to present to users for feedback to understand how they might be useful, where users expect to see them, and how they expect them to work. I planed out the research questions, created high-fidelity mocks and a prototype for these research sessions.
Phase Three:
Currently ongoing, this phase aims to identify the risks and additional use cases not explored in phases one and two. We also began collaborating with additional teams to further understand their needs, risks, and use cases. There are ongoing efforts to explore the needs of an automations management page and additional required automations.
Outcome
The need for automations throughout Indeed has been heavily validated by the first two phases of this project. The participants we spoke to during the research sessions are excited about this feature, noting how much time and effort it will save them in their daily tasks. Teams we worked with and spoke to about this initiative are also excited. Although there is additional work to be done before this project goes live, it is eagerly anticipated by many.