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Monika Izdebska

Building the job interview practice platform

For who?
Riveter
Time
10 months
My role
Lead UX Designer
Riveter was founded in the turmoil of the COVID-19 health and economic crisis. Initially, the platform offered free and discounted resources for the unemployed (free access to apps, courses, services) that allow users to spend their time more productively.

Over time, the number of mass layoffs has decreased and the needs of the target audience have changed somewhat. Their main goal was to find a job, not only managing the excess of free time. Therefore, our team started to think about the direction of the product development. We decided to offer users (in addition to resources) a free tool mock interview tool.

UX Challenges

How to help a people in a difficult life situation achieve their goal (find a job) by focusing on only one specific part of the job search process. One of the main challenges was building the network around the portal. The product should deliver greater value when users share their content with others.

UX Goals

Due to limited time and resources, we focused on a specific solution to one of the users' problems (lack of confidence during a job interview). At the same time, we wanted to create a place that focuses on a community of users so that they can interact with each other, give each other feedback and learn from each other's responses.
Learning more about Users
We took a step back to look at users again. I created new personas based on interviews and the knowledge provided by the project manager who is in constant contact with the users (leading various events in which they participated). We conducted interviews and surveys to identify the biggest issues in preparing for a job interview. Users struggled with motivation, organizing their own time to practice, some of them were unwilling to publish the video with their face, some users also responded that they would like to get more and better feedback (at a later stage, one of our goals was to encourage users to comment and rate the community responses).  
Solution
During the process of several weeks, I designed wireframes, mockups, tested and discussed solutions with the team. One of the improvements we made was new onboarding, where we explain the privacy rules to users and emphasize that recordings are set to non-public by default, meaning only the user can see them unless they choose to share them with the community. To make it easier to record the first response (statistics show that a significant number of users did not record any responses, whereas after recording the first response users usually record the next few, so we focused on this initial barrier of the first recording).

Onboarding flow

As we were constantly introducing new features and expanding the portal, we needed a place where the user would have quick access to the most important items. So we created a dashboard with notifications and "your progress" section. Dashboard is composed of modules so that it can be transformed and changed depending on the current needs / direction of development of the portal. To encourage users to practice we introduced gamification elements. For specific actions the user gets points and can achieve a higher level. Both individual practice and contribution to the community (watching another user's video, giving comments) are rewarded.