DC Tech Hub

Intro: The City of DC’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) has been working with an external agency to outsource development on a white-labeled tech hub. With other cities having found success in providing similar resources to their communities, and disparate resources available to the DC tech community. From the Human Resources perspective, the goal of this site is to provide a number of avenues for job seekers, HR teams and managers to network, find events, and socialize job opportunities. The city would like to know how well it helps connect and inform employers and future employees alike, and for ways it can streamline the employment process on its site.

Major cities provide tech hub resources with one of the major functionalities providing employment in their cities. In doing some research, studies shows that 45% of recruiters and or employers have found employees through online job portals. DC metro area’s job growth is on the rise and DC’s tech hub wants to provide the avenue for employers looking to expand their company by posting job opportunities.

Analyses: For this project, I started with a Nielsen’s heuristics evaluation and a competitive analysis. The heuristic evaluation was to help identify possible usability problems or errors with the design of user interfaces. Competitive analysis was to see what the difference between DC hub and competitors had on their sites. These analyses helped me narrow my research. Competitors I used were Indeed, LinkedIn, and Dice. These competitors have specific search options and sections for employers and/ or recruiters. Looking at this project from a Human Resources stand point, and as an entrepreneur, hiring and posting jobs became my narrow search.

Heuristic evaluation & competitive analysis

Testing: Formal and informal usability testings. Which was to gather information and insight from the users. Testing: For the testing, I performed 5 Informal usability tests via Zoom and 3 formal usability tests via usertesting.com. I focused more on the jobs portion and from a Human Resources point of view, how employers and/ or recruiters post jobs on the site. What I learned from the users were pretty common answers. One of the tasks I asked to do to the users were to be an employer or hiring manager and to navigate the site to post jobs for job seekers that they’re looking to hire.

Insights: Insights for the website were:

• Initial visit to the website is overloaded with confusion. As in the users didn’t know initially what the site was for, except that it says “discover DC’s tech ecosystem”. With no real explanation of what that means, except that the word tech stands out so the users thought its some kind of tech site.
• A second insight was that the users were frustrated with the completion of the simple tasks because there is no filter. For example, employers had no filter options for job seekers specifications. So salary range, full, part, temporary or contract positions and mid high and senior level positions weren’t differentiated. Another research finding for the filter section was that 28% of job seekers go to job portals without a job in mind and are just browsing. But because DC’s hub site provides very minimal number of jobs, potential job seekers are turned away.
• Another insight was that the website is not accommodating for employers looking to post jobs. For my task, when asked to post jobs, the user finds the “Don’t see your job? +Submit a job” click box, and upon clicking, the site makes you sign up or sign in. once signed up, the site lands the user back to the homepage, as opposed to where they left off. Eventually, the user would have to navigate back to where they were, which was discouraging. All 5 of the informal testers said they don’t want to return to this site. One of the 3 formal testers kept saying the words “annoying, or annoyed” throughout his task and after browsing the site for 21 minutes, he quit the task without completing.

• Proto Persona: The insights gathered gave data to create a proto persona.

Recommendations: The recommendations for the DC hub site gave clear direction as to what possible users deemed necessary.

• For one, the homepage should be welcoming to any user and target audience as opposed to being confused or questioning for what the site is and/ or used for.
• Another recommendation was to have a separate log in tab or section for employers to keep track of their postings to keep track of where they’re posting jobs in between different job portals.
• And lastly, to organize website content and prioritize to captivate what the user is looking for when landing on the site and to give the users more options. For example, the different tabs on the homepage, such as events, companies, jobs, and so forth, do not have drop down menus or anything to showcase what those tabs mean before clicking on them.

Conclusion: The DC hub site has much potential in providing a platform for employers and recruiting companies. With some guidance and support, hubDC.tech will be the go-to site for job seekers as well as employers and/ or recruiters in DC to post jobs due to the engaging, visually accommodating change of the site.