JazzHR So Far
July 2019 — An almost-two-years update
Well, I’ve been at my first gig for 20 months. I’m the UX Designer at JazzHR in Pittsburgh, PA. In short, we make awesome recruiting software for small- and medium-sized businesses. We’re not perfect—but our customers love us 🙂
Rather than write a fancy “portfolio piece” on one long, complex project, I figured I’d just write an update on how the job is going and what I’ve learned so far. (Okay, I’ll mention a few projects, too!)
Good stuff
- I get to do a little bit of everything! User interviews, secondary research, prototyping, detailed UI design, some PM stuff… I like being a generalist.
- The business values qualitative research. This is great! Nobody questions why I spend time interviewing customers or running quick surveys. That research is complemented by lots of quantitative metrics, including usage date (from Pendo) and backend stuff (in Periscope).
- In the time I’ve been at JazzHR, our product process has shifted from barely-contained chaos to a true implementation of Agile. We’re trying to do good research, start small, and iterate until we hit key metrics. Every team is involved in making business plans and building the product roadmap. We even have a process diagram.
- My computer science background is coming in handy. I don’t write code on the job, but I can talk with the dev teams about frontend issues, data-structure stuff, you name it. I even picked up some SQL-fu to get usage data out of our database.
- I work with some really good people. I didn’t have a manager last summer, which was tough. We had to get a tricky partner integration across the finish line—with no product leadership. Luckily the engineering team put up with me as a temporary PM, and since then, we’ve hired some great Product-department leaders.
Challenges
- Working as a solo designer has its cons. My workload is fine, but it’d be nice to collaborate with a bigger team of experienced designers and researchers. I miss the teamwork and critique process from grad school.
- The amount of research I can do feels limited. We’re doing a decent job of early, exploratory research, but not enough prototype testing (before we build stuff) or usability testing (after we ship stuff). It’s hard to make meaningful prototypes for some areas of the app, and research recruiting is a bear.
- We haven’t had roadmap space or dev resources to address some big design debt. The JazzHR webapp isn’t mobile-friendly, there are way too many UI patterns, button colors don’t mean much… We’ve managed to shed some old features, which is a start. But it’s hard to build a business case for “make all the buttons look the same.”
Okay, okay; that was vague. Here are some things I designed that we’ve actually shipped!
Candidate List and Search redesign
The Candidate List allows users to sort through their job candidates. They can slice up their database by job, source, application date, and a bunch of other data points, then act on all those candidates at once.
We found that the old version of the Candidate List didn’t let our heavy users do the complex searches they wanted. In addition, its outdated UI made it hard for new customers to do much of anything. So we blew it up and started from scratch.
- Conducted 15+ user interviews, including 4 on-site contextual inquiry sessions. Worked with a dev to create some front-end prototypes for usability testing
- Designed a new responsive UI for filtering your entire candidate database. Added a ton of filters and eliminated the need for an old-school “advanced search” mode
- Fixed some convoluted UX for merging duplicate candidates and performing bulk actions (e.g. emailing a bunch of people that have a specific tag or workflow stage)
- Designed a typeahead search experience for finding candidates quickly based on key contact info
- Cut the time it takes to merge duplicate candidates in half
Interview Scheduler + Candidate Self-Scheduling
The Interview Scheduler is intended for booking complex interview sessions through your company’s calendar system— imagine a half-day onsite interview. Candidate Self-Scheduling is an integration with Calendly that allows JazzHR users to book phone screens automatically.
The old scheduling tool was rigid and outdated. We were losing sales to competitors with better scheduling, and calendar syncing was a constant headache for our support team. So we blew it up, rebuilt the backend tech, and redesigned the scheduling process.
- Conducted 20+ user interviews across the two projects
- Replaced redundant legacy systems with the new Interview Scheduler, which treats a synced calendar as the source of truth. The new scheduling flow has an 84% conversion rate
- Maintained backwards compatibility with existing “interview guides” that were scheduled in the old system
- Iterated on both features with feedback from a beta group (50+ customers) and from the public releases
- Increased the overall attach rate for JazzHR scheduling tools by 8 percent, with more lifecycle marketing to come
Some of the advanced features we built into the Interview Scheduler are seeing lower adoption than we would like. We should have started with a smaller project that focused on a simple use case—we think the research overrepresented customers that have complex interview processes. After all, the folks that wanted to talk with us have strong opinions on interviewing!
Miscellany
We’ve been shipping a lot of stuff lately!
- I designed a Chrome extension for importing candidates around the web, e.g. from your email or LinkedIn. Check it out in the Chrome web store.
- Two integrations and counting with pre-hire assessment providers. I conducted 12+ interviews to validate the partnerships and figure out the best ways to show assessment data in JazzHR.
- JazzHR Texting in partnership with Canvas. I did user research, made some prototypes for our stakeholders, and helped design the user flow between our app and the Texting Chrome extension. We’ll eventually absorb more texting functionality into the app, but we wanted to get something out quickly so we can see how folks use it.
