My journey at Jooble

Jooble is an international job search website used daily by millions of people in 69 countries.

DTE Ukraine (Direct to Employer Project)

Ukrainian Job-Board

Role: UX Researcher, later UXR Lead

🚩 My role & goals

When I joined the company, my primary role as a UX Researcher at the Jooble Design team was to establish continuous research in the product team. Conduct interviews and usability tests regularly. Responding to the team requests and using various research methods help them find valuable insights and answers to the questions.

⛓️ Challenges

• Establish proactive research culture instead of a reactive one. Doing research ahead of time and performing usability tests prior to the beginning of the development sprint.
• To achieve the previous point - set up an effective user recruiting process with high conversion rates to the research study.
• Deliver research results to the team in a clear manner.
• Spread the knowledge about the importance of UXR and Design across the whole company.
• Create an accessible knowledge base about the users.
• Commence and set up research of B2B user segment in addition to B2C

🤔 Approach

Since the beginning, I created a task backlog for myself and the team to track my tasks. Any member of the product team was able to approach me with their requests. It helped me to plan my research studies ahead of time and prioritize them.

In my work, I always tried to look for the most effective methods to use during my research studies. Some tasks were easily solved with a simple round of interviews, and some needed a more creative approach, like combining regular interviews with 5-second tests. In order to validate some data in my findings, I usually requested additional information from product analysts and data science teams.

As a UXR professional, one of the most critical parts of our job is not actually to do the research itself but to present and share knowledge. We have to make our work and our results count at all times. In order to keep teams interested in my studies, I always used clear, structured documentation or presentation with clear takeaways, conclusions, and recommendations when necessary.

🙂 Just a list of some things we did

• Many usability tests of updated profile creating flow, SERP, JDP pages, mobile navigation testing, B2B client-employer account testing.

I've conducted moderated and unmoderated tests. Since we were working with an audience of blue-collar workers, not the most tech-savvy people out there, I picked the most straightforward options in order to run the usability testing. Link to Figma prototype during Zoom/Viber video call or if the study was offline - we offered our participant test device close to theirs, or if possible, we were setting up the prototype for their device dimensions ahead of time. That was done in order to maintain the test scenario as close to reality as possible.

• Dozens of B2C and B2B interview rounds

In order to recruit participants from the B2C sector, I used hotjar polls on our website with invitations where users had an opportunity to leave their contact details. For the B2B sector, I was working closely with the sales team that helped me to find participants for the research studies.

• Calculating SUS metric for the employer account.
• Calculating SEQ metric for the profile flow
• Collaborating with the marketing team - ToV testing for our product communications.
• Dozens of studies about user behavior, onboarding experience, and strong and weak points of our product and competitors.

🥵 The process

I've received requests from the teams (Design, Product Managers, Development, Analytics, Data Science, and Marketing) whenever they faced a task, problem, or question.

After receiving the initial input data, I added a research task to my backlog. I prioritized it according to the general theme of what we are working on (Current epic, main goals of the project for the current quarter). So research studies that had potentially more significant impacts on the grand scheme of things were always prioritized higher. In case it was usability testing, I planned it so I could do it before the actual development sprint started.

After planning, I synchronized with the team, where we brainstormed potential research methods we could use and agreed on the approach to tackling the task. Depending on the research methods, the deadline was set and translated to the team's initial "stakeholder."

If needed, we commenced user recruiting right away since it was the most time-consuming task. Usually, we used the most effective method, which is hotjar poll on our website, as well as respondent.io platform for international research studies.

After completing the research study, it took 1-3 days to analyze data and insights, get additional data from the DS or Analytics teams (if necessary) and combine it in a well-presented research study document in Notion.

In the research documentation, I always prefer to put the key information, such as conclusions and recommendations for the team, at the beginning of the document and a description of the study after.

You can see examples of the studies I did (The ones I am allowed to showcase) down below in the Explicit NDA content section.

🤫 Explicit NDA content

If you want to check out how I document my studies, here you can check some (The ones I am allowed to share. But let’s be cool and pretend that I am risking my life here) Please note, studies are in the russian language.

ToV Research - https://evergreen-tarragon-32e.notion.site/Tone-of-Voice-984b18bd0e774aedab14ce6202ebd8b2

Profile flow user test - https://evergreen-tarragon-32e.notion.site/e120c16e3d14437687da10838b2f600d

🌍 A little bit about DTE HU & RO

Due to the unfortunate events of 24th of February 2022 our business had to react correspondingly. Jooble made its services free for our Ukrainian DTE product. We've decided to launch our DTE (Job-Board) product in Hungary and a little bit later in Romania.

It was a great opportunity to explore something new. Hungarian and Romanian markets are quite difficult to approach when it comes to UX research, so I used all the possible resources in the company I could afford to make sure our team wont be blindly launching and maintaining the product.

I worked with local sales teams and translators to facilitate research on these markets. It helped to discover the main differences in the new markets compared to the Ukrainian one and navigate the product in a user-oriented way.

🏆 Notable achievements

I guess you're already tired of reading, so yes, I am glad to inform you that I successfully handled all the challenges and even more!

Thanks to my marvelous team and a lot of support from management, UX Research became an essential part of our processes. Regular research findings were getting more attention results were bringing value to our product by helping increase conversion rates, user retention, and revenue. As a result, I got a seat at the table of the executive team, having the opportunity to advocate for the users. It was something I am proud of the most - being able to shape strategic decisions by bringing my own expertise to the table.

Jooble Aggregation

Job aggregator (Search engine for jobs) - available in 69 countries around the world.

Role: UXR Lead

🪧 Context

While the DTE project at its roots was user-oriented, the main business of Jooble - Aggregator was working according to the holy rule - if it works - don't touch it. But the company decided to invest in the product team of the aggregation business to generate more user value; hence - we needed UX Research to learn about the audience. We decided to start from the most profitable markets (US, CA, UK, DE, FR, AT, NL). I also got an opportunity to hire & manage a small but brave team of UX Researchers.

🚩 Goals

• Set up and plan research for 7 countries (US, CA, UK, DE, FR, AT, NL) for B2C and B2B users
• Create UXR Artifacts. (User Personas, CJM, Insight database, User Guide for the new members of aggregation product team to use)
• Work closely with the product team, and help them generate product initiatives and ideas with the help of insights gathered during research processes.

⛓️ Challenges

• Find an effective solution to recruit users for the research studies.
• In collaboration with the team share the knowledge of UXR and its importance across development and product teams that had no previous experience working with researchers & product designers.
• As a team leader, organise the work of the team, and establish new processes of knowledge sharing.
• Limited timeline of 4 month to complete the discovery research

🙂 Just a list of some things we did

• We've conducted hundreds of interviews with users across the globe.

We have learned about all the problems and challenges people of different ages, genders, nationalities, and professions experience during a job search. To recruit participants, we've used hotjar, email research invitations, and external tools such as the Respondent.io recruiting platform.

• Created informative and well-polished personas for our users.

While designing personas, we had an approach where we additionally highlighted key insights that made our personas stand out from each other.

• With the team built a fully-fledged CJM and insights database.

The insight database became one of the most popular artifacts across teams to generate product ideas. Insights in this doc were divided by main topics, separated by countries and type of users (blue/white collars), and each insight was completed by quotes from the users and the number of occurrences during interviews.

• We've created the Ultimate User Guide for the teams to use.

This guide is beneficial for newcomers. It helps to understand who are those people we are building the product for.

Example of our persona. With highlighted insights. Collaborated with graphic designers to create custom template for all our personas.

🏆 Notable achievements

• In the short term, the UXR team gained influence across the product teams of the aggregator.
• Collaborating with the team successfully shared the knowledge of UXR and its importance across development and product teams with no previous experience working with researchers.

💙 Conclusion

I can describe my work at Jooble as an exciting eye-opening challenge that I was blessed to take together with wonderful people. Being able to build trust around UX Research at the company, I got an opportunity to be the voice of the users when key decisions were made. I enjoyed collaborating with various professionals in our company to achieve great results and sharing these little victories with the team. Hands down best time of my life.

Yet😉

Jooble 💙💚