Authors: Dr. Harry Brignull, Lead User Experience Consultant, Madgex Simon Devitt, Online Publishing Director, Haymarket

1. A user-centred view on how to leverage your assets Dr. Harry Brignull, Madgex Simon Devitt, Haymarket

2. So, what are your assets?

3. Infrastructure Staff Financials (obviously) Copyrights, trademarks, patents Products & Services

4. These are all important, but at the end of the day, they all boil down to one thing.

5. “This looks good... I’ll use it.” “... And if I like it, I’ll become loyal.”

6. Needs Brand PERCEPTION Goals Expectations user Products / services

7. YOUR BRAND IS NOT YOUR LOGO In mergers and acquisitions, companies are sold at many times the value of their books. Why? Because the brand is valuable. And where does the brand exist?

8. Here. It emerges through the user’s experience with your product Image credit: paulsobek, Flickr

9. Your users are your biggest assets If you understand your users, you know how to move forward.

10. Case Study Madgex ‘CV Search & Match’ design process

11. The opportunity space Madgex is a digital recruitment platform provider Our main offering is a white label job board platform

12. The opportunity space Job Boards are all about trying to grab the attention of potential candidates – but nowadays many employers already have their attention. A more efficient approach for those employers is to allow them to take their pick of the appropriate candidates and contact them directly. Targeted recruitment - not broadcast advertising

13. I’m talking about CV Databases. The trouble is – they’re a dime a dozen! Our challenge was to create one that’s radically more effective at meeting customer needs.

14. A traditional approach to design: - review your competitors - mix together their best features - add your own visual identity

16. 16 Fingers crossed! “Fingers crossed that when the system finally gets built, it meets our users needs, so it’s popular and we make money!” That’s not smart – it’s much more effective to start with user needs, and reality check your ideas as they evolve.

17. The wrong approach: “outside in” “Design” treated as a layer of decoration plastered on the outside Product concept & business objectives Read more: http://bit.ly/dansaffer

18. The right approach: “inside out” Start with user needs, then get designing straight away.

19. The Madgex “inside out” design process Identify the broad opportunity space Understand potential userbase Carry out contextual interviews Elicit pain points, stopping points & complaints with status quo Analyse findings to prioritise and clarify information into design goals

20. So we got in touch with our intended user base The Recruitment Consultant The Direct Employer The Job Seeker

21. We interviewed them and watched them using existing products This was essentially an activity in looking for pain points What did they dislike about the status quo? What did they have trouble using? Simple approach: deep insights!

22. Recruitment Consultant pain point: Are these CVs fresh? People change jobs all the time – but they don’t go back and update the CV database. Our solution: make it super easy to update your CV’s status. Job seekers are reminded with periodical emails and can update with just one click. And make it possible for recruiters to filter the CVs by freshness, e.g. “Only show me CVs that have been updated in the past two weeks”

23. Direct Employer pain point : I can’t buy something if I don’t know what I’m going to get! With traditional CV databases, the employer can only see a very limited amount of information about the candidate before they buy access to the CV. Recruitment consultants don’t have this problem – they will happily spend hundreds of pounds a month to have unlimited access to all the CVs in a database. But this is a stopping point for direct employers. Why would they willing pay for an unknown commodity?

24. The Madgex solution Show almost the entire CV before requiring payment How? By stripping out all personally identifying details Upon payment, the employer is shown the candidate’s name & contact details. This simple design change opens up the market to direct employers

25. Direct employers: a big revenue opportunity Direct employers account for up to 40% of job postings on some job boards As individuals they have low budgets – but there is a very large volume of them They are currently shut out of current commercial models because of the pricing structure.

28. Job Seeker Complaint: Don’t make me retype my CV every time I want to register on a damn job site! Image credit: wikipedia

29. Our solution: allow import and export We allow users to import Word documents – or any page on the web! We allow job seekers to export their CV in various formats and take it elsewhere “Leave the cage door open and the bird will return” – Chinese proverb

30. Nobody was clamouring for these improvements The interviewees were capable of demonstrating the pain points but theyweren’t able to articulate solutions They accepted the pain as just “the way things are” The pain points became our list of design challenges.

31. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”- Henry Ford This is the big take-home message for today: don’t just ask your customer base for their ideas for solutions. Interview them about their experiences, and observe them using competitor products. Once the design problems are clearly articulated, your R & D team have the benefit of laser-like focus.

32. Cordis, a medical device manufacturer, used a very similar process to turn customer input into design. In a three year period, their shares went from to $20 per share to $109 Read the Harvard Business Review case study here: http://bit.ly/cordis

33. You don’t just do this pre-launch- design is an ongoing process of iteration and optimization

34. Haymarket case study Simon Devitt Online Publishing Director

36. Haymarket Overview Historically a large proportion of profit has come from recruitment in our weekly magazines. Now a high proportion of our online revenue is coming from the jobsites. We started out using in-house developed jobsites with customised interfaces based on individual publishers opinions of how a good jobsite should work. We also realised that our sites were underperforming because of an inconsistent approach, poor SEO and poor User Experience We needed to move faster and establish a best of breed suite of functionality. We moved 11 existing jobsites to the Madgex platform and have launched an additional 8 new jobsites since.

38. Applications increased by 68%

39. Cost per acquisition reduced by over 50%Stats Jan-Jul 08, generated through Hitbox On Third Sector, started with a basic job board platform in Nov 2006. Limited features & usability became apparent . We worked with Madgex to develop a custom version of their platform and immediately saw improvements.

40. You MOT your car once a year – why not your user experience? Even though we were set up for SEO and usability, we didn’t want to tread water We wanted continuous, cyclical improvement - so we engaged in SEO analysis and UX research We wanted even more users arriving on the site, and even more staying and completing valuable activities.

41. In a typical UX MOT project, 18 hours of session footage is recorded This is transcribed, tagged & analysed, then gets distilled into highlight videos.

42. A typical UX study produces 20-30 optimisation opportunities Here’s just a couple of them

43. Job Seeker Registration Registration is a necessary stepping stone to indirect revenue generating activities like Email Alert setup and CV Publishing

44. Job Seeker Registration Having filled in this form, users were taken to the following page...

45. In the research sessions, a few users became confused here because they didn’t read the text.

46. After redesign We made some simple changes to the wording and layout to make it clearer for “speed reading”

47. 12% uplift in completed registrations Comparing stats for April, May & June 2008 to the same months in 2009

48. Job Details & Application Job Detail Page Job Application Page In the research sessions, users would often go back to the job detail page, to gather details for their covering message. They found this back-and-forth frustrating.

49. Job Application Page We added the job details to the application page, to make things easier for them

50. Uplift in job applications on one jobsite from 2008 (before) to 2009 (after) On average this gave a 51% uplift(though some credit must be attributed to changes in the economy)

51. Cognitive overload “What does this all mean?” Both SEO and UXO improved the number of users who complete valuable activities Time investment: “How long is this going to take?” Users start an activity, e.g. Apply for a job Disorientation: “How do I proceed?” Fatigue “This is tiring” SEO increased the number of users here. User Experience Optimisation (UXO) reduced the leakage of users during activities A reduced number complete the activity they set out to do Drop-outs