RESUME GENIUS | Redesign

Project’s Description

Resume Genius is a Webapp that helps people to create top-grade resumes in minutes.

Although having a good conversion rate, was necessary to improve the app to guarantee a better experience for our users and increase the profits from the business perspective.

My role in this project was mainly as an Ui designer. However, I have been involved in all stages of the process.

Understand the Problem

Our users are mainly people that do not usually use the computer on their daily jobs.

• They’re mostly Blue-collar workers.
• They aren’t looking for a creative and beautiful resume.
• They don’t have a portfolio to show to a potential employer.

What they really care is to get a very well written resume without putting too much effort on that.

However, not everyone knows how to build and write a good resume. In some cases, this could be a big nightmare.

So… our job is to guide and help to create a professional resume with minimum effort from the users.

Research

We asked our users to share with us their experience when they’re looking for a new job. Our goal was to identify their motivations, pains and achievements in this process.

Also, we used User Journeys to better understand the path they take when interacting with the product.

Luckily we had data that showed us a bunch of information about their experience with our APP. Where they got stuck, what steps do they take longer to take an action, when they bounce, etc…

These are just a few points that we’ve decided to revise based on our analysis:

• The number of templates, since users spend a lot of time just to pick one (there are too many templates).
• Guide the users instead of letting them to choose their own path.
• Reduce the amount of questions to create a resume.
• Provide a mobile version.

Apart from this, we did a benchmarking to see what our competitors were doing and how they solved the problem for their users.

We also reviewed the entire APP and identified some UX issues:

Generate Ideas

We (designers) challenged the rest of the team (Marketeers, Developers and PMs) to have one meeting a day for a whole week. Our goal was:

1. Share our findings from our research.
2. Listen their ideas.
3. Debate those ideas.

We all agreed that was necessary to change the philosophy behind our product.

Instead of providing an app to allow people create resumes based on their own feelings, we need to create a product that helps and guide them to create the most professional resume.

Some of our ideas:

• Ask to experts (recruiters) to revise our resume templates.
• Provide thousands of perfectly written job descriptions across different industries (this will save a lot of time to our users and will guarantee a well written resume).
• Motivate people with no work experience to get a respectable resume.
• Anticipate user needs.
• Get a resume more focused on the user’s industry.

Design Solutions

We decided to start this step with the user flows. This was maybe the most difficult task we faced because we had too many different scenarios. However, we knew this wasn’t a waterfall project, so we could always improve the flows during the process.

After designed all the flows we started sketching some low fidelity wireframes to start visualising ours ideas and identify new ones.

Once the low fidelity wireframes were finished, we (design team) have discussed the possibility of making some additional improvements in to the flow and some user interactions.

Since the app doesn’t have too many different screens we’ve decided to create high fidelity prototypes for 3 different flows and test it.

We’ve got a very promising results… We were definitely in the right way. 

After analyze all the available data and getting feedback from our teammates, we made some minor flow modifications and improved a few design elements.

Implement

We (designers) worked close with the PMs and Developers on this step. Of course this was their moment to shine, but we wanted to be sure that we were all in the same boat.

All the information needed was provided. Things like style guides, components, journeys, assets, etc…

This new desktop version was released only for 20% of the users. We also did some A/B Tests to compare different approaches.

Final Look

Remember when I said that we should try to anticipate the user needs? So, after they pick a template they will see 5 different questions like the one in the image above. These questions will help us to identify the user type.

Why it looks so “simple”?

1. We wanted to keep our users focus on their goal.
2. A big percentage of users have shown some resistance to a more “elaborate design”.
3. The users will be more committed with our product after answering these quick questions.

 Results & Feedback

It’s time to talk about numbers…

• Conversion Rate increased 55%.
• Bounce Rate decreased 62%.
• Number of complete resumes increased 40% (the users still can skip a lot of steps).
• Time needed to get a professional and complete resume decreased 68%.

After a week, the management team decided released the new version for everyone. The 55% increase in the conversion rate was like gold to them.

However, we still have a lot of work to do… Based on the feedback we got:

• Our templates are quite similar and look outdated.
• Users can’t know how many remaining questions are left to complete the process.
• Could be interesting to show a preview of the resume during the process.
• Some UI elements need to be improved.
• Integrate linkedin with our app to automatically import their experience, education and personal information.
• Etc…

Final Thoughts

This journey had some ups and downs but with everyone’s help the main goal was achieved: Design a product that helps people to create a more professional resume.

Do you know what I liked more? Heard from our users that with our help they started getting more feedback from potential employers.

Of course, we still have a lot to improve but like I said before… this is a work in progress.