Career Center Dedicated Web Pages for HR Professionals
Audience
For the prototype: Stakeholders in the Career Center of Kellogg
For the finished web pages: Corporate recruiters coming to Kellogg to interview students
Team
Myself as UX Lead & Researcher; content writer
Challenge
After conducting interviews to understand the needs of the ultimate users, help stakeholders for the site visualize the navigation and content of a rebuilt site. (Summer 2016)
techniques & tools
Interviews, Axure, discussion
outcome
This low-fidelity prototype served as a sort of straw man for discussions by the stakeholders over the navigation and to some extent the content of the rebuilt site.
http://mbvqsq.axshare.com/#p=why_kellogg
The Project
Corporate recruiters are an important part of what a prestigious business school offers to students, and making sure that those recruiters find their visits to campus fruitful is important to the school’s Career Center. Over time, web pages presented to professional recruiters had grown to a fairly bloated state, had fallen behind the design and branding of other portions of the site and had been found to be irrelevant to an important segment of the site’s intended audience.
Working with a content writer and the head of the career center, I conducted interviews of corporate recruiters to better understand their needs, timelines for recruiting visits and the pressures they faced in doing their work. With the learnings from these interviews, we had a strategy for pruning the site, both by editing existing pages, dropping some content and writing some new content.
The Problem
Presented with a wireframe representing our new approach for the site, many of the stakeholders—the counselors and staff of the career center—were concerned about the direction, and in particular did not seem to understand the navigation we were proposing. At least in part this was because they did not connect the labels used for the navigation with the content, either that which already existed or that which remained “to be written.”
The Function of the Prototype
In order to help demonstrate the flow of the site for the ultimate end users, and thereby get the approval of the career center stake holders, I created this prototype to give them a clickable experience. In some places there is actual full content, in others a suggestion or draft of content and some pages are functionally wireframes with section headings but only lorem ipsum-like content.
This prototype ‘tells the story’ of a user coming to the site. It allows the stakeholders to read the (draft) copy in context, and to navigate based on that content. This helped stakeholders to better understand the flow of information on the site and come to terms with the new smaller site with its reduced navigation.
Yeah, But It’s Ugly
As with other prototypes I have created, this one is quite lo-fi, and was abandoned once it had fulfilled its purpose. It exists not to impress the visitor with snazzy design, but to stimulate conversation around an approach, in this case a much-reduced navigation structure and slimmer content. (Note that a full-fledged design already existed, could be pointed to on other parts of the site, and was non-negotiable for these pages.)
By sharing it with the stakeholders we could have helpful discussions about the structure of the site and its content before making the effort to finalize content and do all the programming needed to launch it.