THE JOBRING CHALLENGE
UX residency and hackathon at MICA
Project Brief
Design a talent pool platform/service that leverages peer to peer connections to find the most qualified candidates for open roles. Elements such as academic qualifications, relevant work experience, skill sets and attitudes go beyond what a talent scout may be able to evaluate so you will want to leverage industry specific knowledge in designing your tool. Your solution will hereby be known as “JobRing” Your final pitch is a live demo of the solution supported by your process and strategy in arriving at your solution.
Scope and constraints
Our job was to create a solution and working prototype in just over 48 hours. My entire team worked remotely.
Roles and responsibilities
I was a part of a group of 6 people who were all in the UX Design program. My specific role was UI designer.
Process
Day 1 of the challenge we spent time doing initial research. Luckily our team had a hiring manager! We were able to pick the brain of one potential user from within our group. We also reached out to people we knew and did desk research. Spending an hour each doing competitive analysis. After that we came together to discuss our findings. It took some time to develop our overall story that we wanted to tell. By the end of the day were able to develop sketches of our initial ideas for the app and voted on what ideas worked the best.
Day 2 was all about dive and conquer. We split up into two teams, UX and UI. I was a part of the UI team and collaborated with two other designers for the overall look of the app. From there we met up with the UX team who had developed wireframes and we worked our magic to turn them into a high fidelity prototype.
Day 3 was the final presentation. I demonstrated our final prototype to a live audience in Baltimore and hoped for the best. Although we didn’t win the overall challenge, everyone on our team felt confident and proud of what we had built together.
Mood board and branding inspiration
Branding
Between day 1 and day 2 of the challenge each UI team member developed a mood board for our app. We decided our app’s guiding principles were trust, quality, and transparency based on the research we had done. This is the mood board I had created and where we got our color palette from. Once we got together we discussed how designing for tech roles would impact the design. Ultimately we decided dark mode would be a great choice for the job seeker’s view, while light mode would be more appropriate for the hiring manager’s perspective. Seeing as we had little time to put things together we used the Material design system as a base for our entire product.
