Career buddy is a recruitment agency, talent development, and media company with a mission to help young, mission-driven professionals across Africa find their dream job. They work with employers/companies to find and hire the best employees as efficiently as possible as well as position themselves as employers of choice. Their work with professionals is aimed at helping them find the right opportunities that match their skills, values, and career aspirations and helping them grow and stay engaged in their jobs and live fulfilling lives.

• Communicate diversity in brand offerings in a clean, super easy, efficient, and client-connecting way.
• Develop a site that’s a good mix of vibrant, professional, and fun
• Position as experts and go to platform for career development resources and for finding high potential African professionals
• Design a digital platform that’s optimized for content reading and sharing

My first task was to perform a UX audit of the site at the time which brought up a few issues that then led to the need of a redesign. Doing this I was able to identify areas that were unclear rather difficult to find. My analysis was able to draw out issues with the user flow, content structure, look and appeal of the site, copies, and the navigational structure all of which would definitely have an effect on the user experience.

Of particular note was how one of the offerings of the brand, which is targeted towards employers, was hidden. The original process to identify this in the previous website would require that one either stumble on it by chance or was probably told about it in maybe a conversation. Career Buddy is not the regular job site and it caters both to talents and employees. Seeing as this was one of the major offerings, the challenge was to then find a way to highlight this, making it easy to find while still keeping its offerings to talents at the forefront as well. In other words, while the major communication of the site was going to be targeted towards talents, I had to come up with a way to also communicate what Career Buddy has to offer employers too without taking the attention off the major audience which are the talents.

In order to achieve this, I mapped out a completely new information architecture for the site such that at the top level navigation, we now had a menu option reading "For Employers". I then structured the home page in a way that introduces people to the career buddy brand, placing emphasis on its offerings and value to talents followed by that for employers. This was achieved and resulted in a much shorter but packed home page than the previous site. Lastly, in putting a bit of the spotlight on the offerings for employers, I added a “What We Offer” page to cover all of Career Buddy’s Offerings.

I worked with a graphic designer in redesigning the look and appeal of the site. We redefined the identity of the brand and then worked together on the User Interface making it into something professional but with a modern, fun, and vibrant feel as opposed to the uptight and way too serious feel that’s common with most sites in the brand’s industry. Career Buddy is more than just a job listing site and we really wanted that to be clear even with the interface design.

Another challenge was in the display of job listings and imagery used for the site overall. The former website lacked original imagery and had overused images or images that didn’t exactly fit into the content being illustrated. To resolve this we resorted to using mostly illustrations and working with patterns to create a uniform feel across images. This further helped to sell that fun and vibrant feel we were going for overall.

We also switched to using tabs for job listings instead of images as getting a uniformed image for every company proved difficult and didn’t make for an optimal appeal or approach for the long term.

A major challenge has been translating designs into development. This is one of my first major designer-developer collaboration and it's been not so smooth. In hindsight, what I would probably do differently, is start with the developer. In other words, keeping him in the loop on design decisions from the early stages.

I also would have done a proper, more thorough and detailed stakeholder meeting trying to understand the goals of the business and taking full lead of the project in terms of giving the direction to go with.

Finally, this project has taught me just how important it is to design with real life content and not lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum is good at the early wireframe stages but before going into final design and development stages, having real life content is super important and saves a lot of time.