01. Problem Identification

Taraki previously had a basic MVP version of a mobile application with no defined design system and a poor user experience. Although the number of downloads was high, there has been low user engagement and retention as many users started complaining about poor user experience.

Hence, there was a dire need to review and improve the overall experience.

How might we..

restructure and redesign Taraki’s job-seeker and employer-facing products in order to increase users, engagement, retention and their satisfaction?

Another outcome was for me to help Taraki set up their in-house design team.

02. Process Definition

To start off, I defined ways of working with the team. The purpose of defining a workflow was to get the team’s buy-in and work in a streamlined manner.

I designed a workflow to work with different teams, including product, business development, technology, marketing and customer service. The workflow included every interaction, activities (internal and external) and process of working on iterations following an Agile Methodology. This workflow contained discussion points, outcomes and participants of each touchpoint along with approximate duration.

03. Knowledge Map

After conducting meetings with the team, I created an initial Knowledge Map. This consisted of:

• Taraki’s products and features
• Targeted Personas
• Vision, Mission, Value Proposition
• Plan to move forward
• Competitors

04. UX Strategy Sessions

In order to understand customer pain points and ideate for solutions, I conducted co-creation UX Strategy sessions over the course of a month with both product teams, i.e. job-seeker product and employer portal.

Prior to these sessions, I prepared a template on Figjam consisting of the following sections:

I conducted desk research and market competitor analysis for the targeted modules before each session. The activities I had planned to do with the team included:

1. Identifying Pain Points
2. Brainstorming and Ideation
3. Affinity Mapping of ideas
4. Prioritisation of ideas (in terms of feasibility, viability and desirability)
5. User Journey Mapping
6. Defining content structure

05. Wireframing

In each UX Strategy session, we collaboratively designed low fidelity wireframes for each module’s major flows. This helped us understand the navigation, user flows and interactions.

Following this, I digitized wireframes on Figma and completed the flows.

Wireframes helped us focus solely on designing flows that reflect the best user experience. We kept in mind the following heuristics:

• Following standards and staying consistent, keeping in mind interactions users are typically familiar with

Taraki users were low-to-medium literate people who were accustomed to using applications like Whatsapp and YouTube. Hence, I made sure to stick to interactions they are familiar with so there is transfer of knowledge.

• Ensuring system status is visible and accessible to users at all times

This included, for instance, clearly communicating to users where they are in the job application process via a progress bar.

• Designing to prevent errors

This meant guiding users with clear action items in case they make a mistake so they can recover from errors.

• Designing for minimal effort from users

This involved making flows less complicated, only asking users to enter information that is absolutely necessary.

06. Design System

DESIGNING A BRAND GUIDE

I worked with a UI/UX designer to tighten up the Taraki logo, formed their brand guide and included a color palette (primary, secondary, semantic and neutral colors), typographic system, icon library as well as illustrations and their usage.

Next, I worked on forming a design system. This included button variations, input fields, selectors, cards etc. as master components in Figma.

I informed the team that the design system will evolve once I work on UI design as more complex interfaces are designed which require unique components.

The initial design system encompassed the following

06. Prototyping / UI Design

Once the initial design system was set up,

• I prioritized modules with Taraki’s product owners
• Highest priority module first, I used wireframes as a base for the flow and the design system as a guide to design Hi-Fi prototypes
  • I started off by defining color and font styles in the Figma file
  • I designed every flow and every interaction


Every interaction designed for the main Jobs screen

• I made sure to design every instance of each flow, i.e. happy paths as well as those with errors and empty states


Happy paths and error states



Hi-Fi responsive and interactive prototypes for the job-seeker product and employer portal

08. A/B Testing

I planned to work on UI in parallel with A/B Testing.

Taraki was built using Bubble framework and hence, development speed and cost was lower than custom development. Due to this, the team decided to conduct A/B testing of developed versions to validate designs.

The process we followed was:

• The product team prepared a Product Requirement Document (PRD) for each feature within a module and I used to review it.
  PRD CONTENTS (CLICK TO VIEW)

  • Objective and goals
  • Rationale behind goals / Mixpanel stats
  • Non-goals (goals which may seem similar to this feature but are out of scope and can be covered in another PRD)
  • Existing design variants
  • A/B Testing release plan
  • Review / QA (per department)
• The dev team used to roll out the desired flow’s variants in chunks, e.g. design variant 1 for 50% of the users and design variant 2 for the remaining 50%. Following this we would analyze data on Mixpanel for user engagement, drop-offs etc.

A/B testing and data analysis on Mixpanel helped us identify which design variant in a flow is preferred by users. Furthermore, the customer service team was in constant touch with users so they received feedback first-hand about changes. The idea was to test with users before finalizing the design.

09. Usability Testing

We also conducted usability tests. I created a detailed guide for the testing to take place. It majorly consisted of:

We picked a few modules and conducted usability testing of around 15 participants (including users and non-users of Taraki app). The main objective was to test Signing up to Taraki (with new users), and test other modules that follow.

Conducting these tests helped us identify:

• User biases that exist when it comes to information flow. For instance, upon selecting the location while signing up, users perceived the location to be the ideal job location (rather than their own location)
• Transfer of knowledge from using other apps. For example, users were aware of how to upload an introductory audio in the job application as the interface look similar to Whatsapp’s voice-note
• Additional features and suggestions, including the ability to receive updates about their job application from the employer
• How users with different educational background use the app differently

Usability testing not only helped us test the application’s flow and interface and receive suggestions, but also made us realize that we should revisit our Personas and categorize people based on their tech literacy level. It also meant people with very low tech literacy don’t necessarily fall within our target personas.

10. Impact ✨