Apply Wiz

a solution to all your job hunting needs

Hackathon Project

As part of Women’s History Month, Essteem & Girl Develop It (GDI) hosted a hackathon

My Role

I was the user researcher and ux designer. My contributions include: competitive & comparative analysis, wireframing & prototyping, usability testing, content writing and typography

Duration

1 Week —> 3 design days & 4 developer days (March 2022)

| Project Overview

Background: Girl Develop It (GDI) is a nonprofit that supports opportunities for women and non-binary adults to learn software development skills. GDI and Essteem have partnered together for a Women’s History Month hackathon.

GDI & Essteem want an app that helps communities of women in tech searching for jobs, applying to them, and developing their network for their next career move.

Their three users for this application would be The Talent, HR Freelancer, and The Manager.

The Problem: Many developers, designers, and data scientists do not want to spend their time looking for jobs. They would like others to do that for them while they spend their time working at their current jobs or learning new skills & developing their portfolios.

Currently, GDI & Essteem need help to bring their conceptual idea of an app called ‘Apply Wiz’ to fruition.

Solution: To eliminate lengthy onboarding phone calls, we created an application that collects relevant information from The Talent so the initial phone calls with the HR Freelancer can be more meaningful.

In addition, we created a high-fidelity prototype of The Talent flow (onboarding to user profile) and low-fidelity wireframes for the HR Freelancer dashboard.

| Personas

GDI & Essteem provided personas of three different users that will be interacting with the Apply Wiz application

Through a competitor app analysis, we aimed to uncover untapped user needs and potential areas for innovation, ensuring our product stands out in the market.

| Research

Competitive & comparative analysis for The Talent key takeaways:

majority have both a free option and an option to upgrade for premium features
company reviews and follow-up rates are rare across the board

Competitive & comparative analysis for The HR Freelancer key takeaways:

majority have some sort of onboarding the talent completes so the company has the needed relevant information
very few include talent recommendations (previous coworkers writing on behalf of the talent)

Due to time constraints, we chose to focus on the flows for the Talent and the Freelancer. We didn’t create one for the Admin persona because GDI & Essteem wanted the same dashboard as the freelancer and just some sort of overruling access to the Freelancer’s work.

| User Flows

| Wireframes

Talent Wireframes

These are just a few of our wireframes — homepage, an example onboarding question, and how the created profile page looks.

Because Apply Wiz creators stated the onboarding call with HR Freelancers could take over an hour sometimes, the client wanted a way to shorten these calls. We decided to include a few onboarding questions to gather all relevant information so the HR Freelancer can really discuss what matters to The Talent and have a more meaningful/impactful onboarding call.

HR Freelancer Wireframes

These are three frames of the dashboard we created for the Freelancer to use — one gives a general overview of the entered job positions, one shows how information would be logged, and the third is how posting would look to the Talent. The dashboard would look relatively the same whether the Freelancer is on jobs, candidates, or companies — just some slight variations in information.

Due to time constraints, we only tested 3 people for the Talent Flow. After meeting with GDI/Essteem, it was decided the Talent flow is more important than the HR Freelancer due to many existing dashboards that could be easily applied for the HR Freelancer.

| Usability Testing & Iterations

There was a 100% success rate among the three users. There were a few prototyping missteps that were noticed and quickly fixed!

| Final Design Prototype & Style Guide

We prioritized bringing the critical onboarding Talent user flow to high-fidelity with interactive prototypes, addressing stakeholder concerns about first impressions and user engagement.

Branding colors of both GDI and Essteem were used but made more accessible

Results

We proudly claimed first place at the hackathon with our groundbreaking Apply Wiz design. The open-source code is already fueling its evolution, with dedicated developers and potential collaborators joining the mission to bring Apply Wiz to life!

Reflections

This hackathon was a whirlwind of creativity and collaboration! Our diverse team, all entry-level, bonded over the challenge of bringing Apply Wiz to life – a tool that will support women and non-binary adults transition into tech. While I'm incredibly proud of what we achieved in three days, I'm especially excited about the future of Apply Wiz.

Something I struggled with during this challenge was not be satisfied with the user research. Given the significant stakeholder assumptions guiding the project, I proposed prioritizing user interviews. By hearing directly from potential users, we can ensure our design is grounded in real needs and data, avoiding the potential pitfalls of untested assumptions.