Disclaimer: During my interview at BoomNation, I had the opportunity to do a design challenge =on improving their user experience to create various sections in order to seek trade jobs. I got the thumbs up from the VP of Product to showcase the work and the process that led to the final stop.
BoomNation is a workforce recruitment app that helps take control of your career by applying to the best trade jobs, boost your skills, & connect with other tradesmen online.
In the current experience within the BoomNation app (job section), users are relying on creating their own experience when they are searching for a new job.
As it is, a list view of jobs doesn't create any net positive for those in the trades industry and with the right prompts // flow, this can be more engaging.
Create a job home page with various sections that can be customized for an optimal user experience.
Job seekers for tradesmen tend to feel a couple of feelings when they are looking for their next role. They can feel excited about the payoff of fulfilling the work. They can feel exhausted after a long day working as an electrical engineer. They can feel a little in-between if what they did was worth the effort to grow their skills.
Using Heuristic Evaluation, it's important to deep dive and understand why they create their own experiences within the app for BoomNation to holistically evaluate what is currently happening.
After looking into the experiences, let's follow up on opportunities to empathize the tradesmen who's looking into jobs within the trade industry.
Let's say the tradesmen identifies himself as a warehouse associate. What is making him struggle that he can't fully come to grips with? In this case below, I wanted to look into key findings within BoomNation's app that stood out.
From here, it's important to look into competitive analysis and see certain features that stands out that can be used to implement for BoomNation's app.
After doing research, Tradehounds & Hammr are the two standouts for what can be learned & extracted.
In the user persona, meet Timo Miroshnichenko. Timo is in his 30's who loves being a warehouse associate.
He has good attention to detail and likes the repetitive work that's being associated to the role. He also thinks it's helped him keep in shape because the work is engaging and rewarding when the hard work pays off.
Often times using other competitors products doesn't provide me adequate intel to find what i'm exactly looking for when i'm job searching. It's nice to see work from other tradesmen that are genuine and real behind the scenes progress that you don't see in the public view and interact with others.
I want to find an app where I can not only have a feed to follow other tradesmen, but I also want an opportunity to find work that can allow me to independently grow as a contractor through the trade industry & showcase my skills in what I can bring to the table.
After showcasing Timo and introducing himself, here, you can see what Timo is looking for in his next product he would like to download in his app:
OK, no problem Timo! We'll make sure to keep this in mind 👍
Based on the above research, it's extremely important to build on the ideas and foundation used to design with integrity and thoughtfulness.
Here are the six features that will be examined through wireframing between iterating on the image banner, search bar, top trades, recommended trades, filter updates, and map // list view.
Wireframes are a good way to experiment what works and what doesn't. Having a good user experience and a good visual design is the equivalent of dancing in a rhythm.
The design system wasn't fully utilized in a way where I was given icons to download, so it was very important to me that the same general, cohesive look was matched within BoomNation's style.
Overall, this was a great way to showcase that progress in designing the primary objectives that needed to be addressed for BoomNation's app.
After reflecting on what could be done differently, there was one feature that stood out that could be improved upon.
For editing profile, this could be improved by making it clickable. With the personalized name and a dropdown arrow next to the image, this will give users the ability to edit their profile or log off their session for the app.
The name adds another element as it's more personalized so it helps give users a better connection to feel engaged on the platform.
As always, below are some general feedback that can be continued to iterate and scale BoomNation as a product to make business profitable and the demand for tradesmen to find their next trade role:
