How might we help candidates prepare for online interviews better?
How's candidates’ experience?
Scenarios 1:
Some people always ask if some peers in some random chat groups would like to mock interviews together. However, the process is neither effective nor efficient. They might wait for a while, and someone shows interest to team up. After that, they still need to share brief info to see if they can mock together.
Scenarios 2:
When observing other students’ mock interview tasks such as whiteboard challenge or app critique, more steps and tools are needed when the whole process moves online. Once, we used Zoom, Miro, timer, and Google Drive simultaneously for a better interview effect.
Therefore, how might we solve those problems and help candidates to prepare better? That’s the initial questions that motivates me to make project come into being.
Initial Findings
Other than the scenarios from observation, I interviewed 5 participants to dive deeper into what challenges they’ve met when preparing and during the online interviews.
How might we provide more feedback to interviewees?
How might we keep motivated interviewees to improve?
How might we direct interviewees to provide more constructive feedback to their peers?
How might we bridge the mindset gap between interviewees and people from industries?
Based on the interview, I realized that people always felt anxious and lost during the preparation for lack of enough feedback on how they react to the interview.
Belongingness with a community might motivate them to practice. And how to create a friendly and organized community that helps interviewees find their peers, even competitors to motivate and practice together might be a great opportunity for this product.
Candidates with limited experience might encounter the situation that both of them do not know how to evaluate each other's performance.
“The unequal information between the companies and candidates makes me stressed and cannot be confident enough.”
Professional suggestions or mentor service might be a valuable opportunity for those interviewees.
How’s the user journey?
After further analyzing the findings from my interviews, I created a journey map to represent the journey that people go through. And the journey can be summarized into 4 phases: searching for resources, practicing, receiving feedback, and improving based on comments.
User Journey Map helps me to organize the process and define opportunities.
Opportunities from analyzing the journey map
How might we organize valuable preparation information for interviewees?
How might we build a focused and motivated community for interviewees?
How might we help interviewees peer up to mock interviews efficiently and effectively?
How might we help interviewees gain more valuable feedback?
Envision the User Flow
I generated a user flowchart to help illustrate the path that user can easily schedule their mock session, match with like-minded peers and improve their performance when reviewing the session.
User Flow to help illustrate both effective and efficient way for user to achieve their goals.
Ideate: design speaks.
Insights from the competitive teardown and the user interviews led me to walk through this interview preparation process. And this user flow helps me ideate these opportunities to features in the design.
Interview Discussion: sociability can make people engaged in the platform and motivate people and generate more valuable content.
Mock with who: offer more mock interview options for users to choose under their availability.
Provide possibly needed tools in one platform, so interviewees do not need to juggle with different products.
Focus on one video box is available if interviewees would like to experience a different way of mock interview.
Feedback is crucial for the mock interview. When reviewing the recordings, interviewees can locate peers’ comments efficiently through timestamps.
The possibilities of the community are endless. Besides discussing interview questions, people can share their recordings to gain suggestions from more peers, even professionals from the industry.
Divergent thinking directs me to think out of the box and develop more design possibilities that I cannot think of at the beginning. After bringing those sketches to group design critique, I have some feedback that supports me to iterate design when wireframing. Simultaneously, get rid of elements that confused people and make an intuitive and friendly design.
Usability Testing: Does the design do the right things?
There are three goals with me when conducting usability testing.
Identify flaws in the current user flow.
Identify the differences between people with different majors interact with this platform.
Are there more opportunities for the platform to provide?
Observations:
Two participants felt like “stars” should not represent people’s current interview level since “stars” more like a rating of experiences but not their ability.
On the interview interface, the return button misunderstood participants. Except for the return button, the “leave room” button should be provided for representing the end of the interview.
Under the recording list, the recordings’ name should highlight the interview type but not the people they interviewed with.
I really enjoyed the experience of usability testing, for it always shed light on something obvious to me but not the same to others. Learning how different people interact with the design, how they are feeling, and why that is. All of those questions drive me to dive deeper into the iterating process with joy!
Iteration
Based on usability testing, I start to have some updates. Provide more options on Education, and use the progress bar to represent the current level. At the same time, keep how copywriting influences users’ feelings in mind. When asking their current level, I don’t want them feeling hurt. Therefore, no matter what level they currently on, the copywriting are sounds positive.
For the next step, I will keep iterating the design based on participants’ feedback and vitalize the design in a high-fidelity prototype, stay tuned!
Takeaways & Reflection
When designing, every element on the interface should have its goals but not only for fun or uniqueness.
Even though the major user flow includes several parts, the most important one is the interview experience. However, when testing, people cannot experience the interview feature on this platform🤔.