Letting Your Users Make Your Biggest Decisions

I run Remote Circle — a job board for jobs you can do at home — filtered by your timezone

Halò 👋

When we started building RC, one of our main focuses was that it would be user-led. To us, that meant that our number 1 priority was getting feedback from our users. We currently gather feedback in 3 main ways:

- Hotjar widget on site — allows users to respond to 7 different questions about the site and their job search

- Polls on social media

- Direct communication with users via email, Linkedin, Twitter, Groups etc.

But it doesn’t stop at simply getting the feedback. The harder part is then processing that feedback into actionable steps which will improve the site. At this point in our journey, we keep it as simple as possible. We look for recurring patterns in feedback(e.g. several users complaining about the same problem or requesting the same feature) and then we decide the urgency of taking action on their request. In most cases, their request involves adding a new feature or refining an existing feature. If it’s drastically affecting the user experience then we would take action immediately. If it’s just a “nice-to-have”, then we put it on our “later” list. It’s that good-ole-fashioned saying “sell painkillers, not vitamins”. If there is a request for a new feature or an update to an existing feature, we tend to fire out a few polls on social media to try and see if everybody else agrees with it. It’s not the most qualitative form of research, but it does the job in terms of validating ideas quickly.

We’re a fairly young site(3 weeks old at time of writing) so we don’t have massive piles of user feedback, although we have enough to recognise trends. So far, 3 things have stood out.

1. Users love the timezone feature but find it a bit clunky to have to select their timezone from a dropdown of 25 timezones. In a lot of cases, they don’t know what their timezone is as we only include the UTC offset, not all the individual timezone names, so they end up leaving the site to research that first.

2. Users looking for tech jobs would like a better way to filter jobs by their own skill e.g. PHP, Javascript, Python etc.

3. Users would like more jobs.

Number 3 goes without saying. We were always of the opinion that a jobs site needs a lot of jobs to be of value to users so this has always been a big priority for us. We’ve intentionally kept the number of jobs limited for the first few weeks of the BETA to allow us to really focus on testing the core features. Over the next 2 months, we are going to start adding more jobs and will be working alongside more remote companies.

The first 2 requests(better timezone function and better filters for tech jobs) were a bit harder to fix, but we’re happy to say that we have(hopefully). So we’re announcing 2 new features on RC this week.

The first is an update to the timezone functionality. The dropdown is gone. Replaced by a smart location field. Enter your city and it will work out your timezone for you. That means you don’t need to leave the site to convert your timezone to its UTC offset equivalent and then come back to fill it in. Just enter your city. That’s it. This feature currently only fully caters to hourly timezones. India for example is UTC+5.5. If you were to enter and Indian location into the City field, it will round up your timezone to “UTC+6”. This will still return fairly accurate results as most companies that are willing to recruit in UTC+6, will probably also be willing to recruit in UTC+5.5 since there is only a 30 min time difference. We plan to continue updating this feature though so we would hope to support non-hourly timezones in the coming weeks.

The second update is that we have removed the “Job Title” field and replaced it with a “Tech Skills” field. This is basically just a filter field. If you choose “HTML”, it will only show you jobs that include “HTML” as a requirement. We’re keen to see what users think about this field or if they would prefer a standard keyword search box?

Check out these 2 new updates and if you have a minute, you can leave some feedback in the Hotjar widget which will show up at the bottom of the screen after 40 seconds(on desktop only). We really appreciate all the feedback we get so if you’ve already left some…………….🤜🤛

We’re continuously developing RC, so if you have any other ideas, feature requests, annoyances or high fives to dish out, you can tweet us here.

And if you’ve not joined RC yet, you can join the BETA here.

Thanks

JT 🤜🤛