Business Review Report

Background

Client: CareerBuilder

My Role: UX, visual design, research, custom components

Viewport: Desktop, internal and customer-facing tool

Design Tool: Figma, Illustrator, Photoshop

Unlike other job portals, CareerBuilder performed employment background checks internally using a screening platform from a company it acquired, which was its most profitable product. The account executive team within the screening division reports on this data monthly to their respective clients in a PowerPoint presentation called the Business Review Report. Unfortunately, the tool they used was outdated, slow to render results and was not usable. The challenge for me was learning the existing tool's intended use, document how users adapted workflows outside the system and design an interface that met both employee and client needs.

Opportunity

Clients found the self-service, data reporting tool unusable and refused to use it so they relied heavily on their account executives to pull reports and analyze the data for them. This additional tasks, on top of regular daily duties, stressed their bandwidth levels because they would perform the data manipulation and analysis manually, outside the tool.

Process

I requested our data analyst pull any information she had on the existing dashboard, which turned out not to be so helpful since the tool was being used minimally. However, there were plenty of IT ticket requests for fixes! To move the investigation along, I partnered with a UX researcher as our first priority was to talk with both user groups of the tool, account executives and their clients. Since the execs are CareerBuilder employees, we took a trip to the suburban office and sat with several members of the account executive team, vets and newbies, as their range in experiences was valuable. With a camera on a tripod nearby, we wanted to record more than just their desktops, we wanted to capture their body language, sighs and frustration. We also spoke remotely with their clients. Our plan was to identify everyone's pain points, needs, workarounds, wish list and more.

With some quantitative and qualitative data available to me I felt armed when the time would come to meet with stakeholders about the design decisions I would make. I sat with the account executives and started sketching their vision, their feedback included helping to prioritize content, requesting smart functionality, explaining the meaning of data sets and recommending improved flows.

After a couple rounds of sketching, I took the account executives feedback and created wireframes in Axure. Some of their needs required custom components that were not a part of our library like the date picker, chart interactions and dropdown menu shown below. It's at this point when I started working closely with the dev team. They needed to be informed early in the process to identify any constraints, ask questions and align expectations. Thereafter, I created a prototype to test the concepts with our internal team members. Plus, I presented the custom patterns to the UX team during one of our showcases to get their feedback and approval to introduce them into our design system.

Result

I achieved pixel perfect comps to review with stakeholders before getting the thumbs up for deployment. About 3 months of work and I was happy to do a final QA in our staging environment before it went live. You'll notice I didn't mention collaboration with a product owner for this case study. This is because she was new to the team so I took lead in product responsibilities as she gained knowledge of the product. In terms of performance of the new and satisfaction of the new tool. The account executives and their clients were ecstatic about the new dashboard, however, the screening division was sold shortly after.