JOIN
JOIN is a SAAS company whose app combines the features of a talent attraction software and an applicant tracking system to help companies find and hire talent.
Registration process
UX Writing
Issue
UX research had found that users setting up company accounts were consistently providing us with inaccurate information about themselves.
30% of users were identifying themselves as a recruiting agency. According to the UX Research team’s manual audits, these were almost all incorrect.
This would be disruptive to JOIN’s growth plans, as we used this data to understand the makeup of our user base.
It also raised the possibility that other data being collected in the registration process was inaccurate.
To do
Drill down into the UX research and try to discover:
Why are users incorrectly identifying themselves as recruiting agencies?
Are there any other ways that users may be providing inaccurate information?
Review the user flow for setting up a company account and make design and copy suggestions to produce more accurate data.
Work with the Product Design team to implement changes.
Work with the Localisation team to identify any ways of optimising the experience for
different languages.Launch the new registration process to a selection of users and study whether the data is
more accurate.Iterate the user flow to improve the performance as much as we can.
User research
User volunteers went through the registration process for their companies. We found:
Some instances of misclicks. Users couldn’t go back to correct mistakes.
Some confusion over the terminology used in the process, specifically the terms ‘recruiter’ and ‘recruiting’.
Users from same company giving conflicting estimates of the size of their company, meaning data could be inaccurate.
Copy and design
Here are a couple of options I recommended. On the second, I tried making the number of employees the header, and recommended A/B testing to see if that improves the accuracy of the data. I’ve also make the clickable space smaller and added a ‘Continue’ button to prevent users from making a mistake here.
Localisation
The Localisation team were able to help with this project, and were able to settle some disagreements over terminology.
They settled a dispute over whether we should ask for a ‘last name’ or a ‘surname’, by pointing out that some people put their family name at the beginning of their name, so ‘surname’ would be more inclusive.
Launch
The new registration process was launched to an initial 10% of users, before being gradually rolled out to more users after a positive initial response.
The UX Research team reported that 20% of users were identifying themselves as recruiting agencies now. This was an improvement, but we still felt we could get that number down more.
Iteration
Initially, we were only able to optimise the existing user flow, as the Product team didn’t have the resources to do anything more substantial. However, the initial success of these changes convinced the Product Manager to let us push further.
We decided to take our work on the question of recruiting agencies one step further by isolating this question, giving it its own screen at the end of the registration process. We also sidestepped the terminology issue by very clearly explaining what we meant by this term.
This meant one more screen in the onboarding process, which tends to hurt the completion rate. However, we took this opportunity to change the first two screens in the flow, where the user creates their account and then their company’s profile.
The first thing we did is switch the two screens around. Before, it was possible that a user would create their account, then create their company profile, before being told their company already had a profile and they’d an invitation from an existing user, which would be annoying. By moving the company profile screen to the beginning, the user would be redirected before wasting any time.
We then removed the screen about company size entirely, and added this question to the screen where the user sets up their company profile, in order to create a quicker registration process. The screen now contains a drop-down menu question asking the user to select the size of their company.
The UX Research team reported that 5% of users were identifying themselves as recruiting agencies now.
Though we felt that we’d accomplished our goal of getting more reliable data from the registration process, the UX Research team reported an unexpected result - the completion rate for this registration process was now lower for German-language users than for English-language users by almost 15%.
We saw an improvement in the completion rate for German-language users, of 10%.
I went back to my localisation colleagues to come up with ideas for how to optimise the German version of this flow a bit more. Our German localisation specialist advised that German users responded less well to being asked direct questions.
We tried switching from a question to more of an instruction in the German translation.
Learnings
Terminology being used across the JOIN product was inconsistent.
This may be confusing users.
This was leading to disagreements among stakeholders over copy issues.
A library of settled copy and terminology would be a useful asset in efficiently developing new features.