The problem
I was engaged by GNR8R to completely redesign and rebuild carsandjobs.com, a Canadian national automotive jobs and education site.
Background:
- Carsandjobs.com is a Canadian website operated by automobile dealers associations - it's primary purpose was to connect people to jobs in the industry
- At the time, not every Canadian province's dealer association was using it - some provinces had created their own sites
- The site was broken and underperforming
- As it is a Canadian site, it needed to support both English and French, using geo-targeting and taking into account Quebec's restrictions around the use of English
- The stakeholders wanted to create new revenue streams through value-added functionality
The solution
I redesigned and rebuilt the website.
Benefits to jobseekers
- Quick start: begin your job search directly from the homepage hero banner.
- Tailored searches: enter keywords and locations to find jobs that match your established career.
- Easy browsing: browse broad job categories if you're starting out or considering a career change.
- Efficient filtering: narrow down results quickly to find relevant job postings.
- Save & alert: save job postings and searches to receive email updates and reduce active search time.
- Quick decisions: view full job descriptions or highlights for fast decision-making.
Benefits to students
- Industry insights: access content on starting a career in the automotive industry.
- Educational resources: quickly find relevant educational programs and scholarships in your area.
Benefits to employers
- Post jobs: easily post new job openings to find candidates.
- Categorize listings: organize job postings for quick discovery by relevant candidates.
- Bilingual options: provide job info in English and French to attract candidates who speak your and your customers' language.
Mobile screens
Desktop screens
How I went about solving the problem
In this project I went through a number of steps:
- Discussed the requirements with stakeholders
- Performed an audit on the information architecture and content of the existing site
- Performed a heuristic analysis of the existing site
- Analysed competitors such as mainstream job search sites used in North America such as Monster.com and Indeed
- Created a new information architecture for the site
- Iteratively prototyped solutions, gathering feedback from stakeholders and from informal user testing with volunteers
- Gathered feedback from dealers via stakeholders
Auditing the existing site
The existing site was structured and written from the perspective of the automobile associations, not the targeted end users. There were effectively three groups of end users, that the existing IA and content didn't fully take into account:
- Jobseekers: the most important
- Employers (e.g. dealers): those posting jobs on the site
- Students: those looking to enter the automotive industry, and looking for education programmes and scholarships
Furthermore:
- Job search functionality was buried under excessive content and required complex forms to be completed
- In contrast, competing sites have simple, front-and-centre search forms and master/detail views for quick refinement
- Competitors also offer two navigation modes: browsing categories and direct search
- The user flows for tasks such as saving a job search was needlessly complex
- The information architecture had no straightforward hierarchy and was hard to navigate, with important content deeply buried
- The site was poorly optimized for mobile, wasting screen space and ignoring UI conventions
- Some parts of the site required unnecessary sign-ups and excessive personal information
Old website
Resolving language and content issues
Quebec restricts English usage by organizations, even for bilingual users.
- To address this, I used geolocation to determine the user's province and language, and added empty states in job search where the user could choose to view results in other languages/provinces.
I learned dealers preferred sending job listings as Word documents.
- I included rich text editing with a preview display and explored automatic Word document conversion, but it wasn't feasible due to resource constraints.
Outcomes
I was responsible for building the front-end of the new site, and providing specs to and directing offshore back-end developers.
The new site was successfully launched.
There was increased site traffic following the re-launch
Some provinces' automobile dealers associations opted to replace their existing job sites with the new site