UX + IA + Desgin

ZipRecruiter Website: Business Wins

Challenge

Our site audit surfaced suboptimal UX and IA including some revenue opportunities. I partnered with various stakeholders to craft briefs and experiments that would not require too many resources and demonstrate value to the business.

Objectives

  • Build and maintain a world-class website that positions ZipRecruiter as an industry-leader embodying innovation, quality, and expertise.
  • Reduce the time it takes to publish website creative
  • Optimize for conversions

Navigation Redesign

Our old nav (below) was designed like a landing page and consisted of CTAs and a Sign In link. It was apparent that we were not following best practices, but proving the effectiveness of new designs would require some user testing and we would also need to A/B test them to ensure they didn’t negatively impact conversion.

User Testing

First we ran user tests to measure success rate for locating specific pages. Success rate was a combo of time to find a page and 1-5 rating for “easy to find.” We used InVision and Usertesting.com to run the experiment and were able to show a clear 14-20% increase in success for finding pages with the new nav.

A/B Testing

Next we coded and built the nav component and launched an A/B test. Not only did we prove no harm to conversion, but we also observed an increase in engagement on both sides of our marketplace in the form of increased page views to sub pages.

Current (Nav 3.0) design below:

Mobile Learnings

Notice below that we have one more layer to our nav where 'Small & Medium Businesses' and 'Enterprise Business' are nested under 'For Employers.' This is because having all three categories on the top layer initially hurt employer conversions on mobile only. We added another layer to simplify the cognitive load on the first layer of the mobile nav which solved the problem in a follow up A/B test.

Inbound CS Cases (Nav 2.0)

Some of the first pages we redesigned were our ‘Contact Us’ pages for employers and job seekers because they were very old and received a lot of traffic. While working to refresh these pages, we identified an opportunity for our Customer Success Team:

  1. Reduce inbound job seeker cases
  2. Increase adoption of our new chat support for job seekers.

Our CS team is tasked with retaining and helping employers. Every job seeker case they get (email or phone) takes away from serving employers.

We were able to reduce inbound job seeker CS cases by 37% month over month and increase chat usage by 16% MOM with the following chages:

  • ‘Help’ links in nav moved under job seeker and employer drop downs
  • Eliminated JS contact page
  • Rerouted all JS support links to chat
  • Removed phone number in footer (so it was only in the employer drop down)

More Wins: SEO + SEM

Redesigning our employer reviews pages resulted in jumping from 51+ organic rank to #1 for terms like ‘ZipRecruiter review’ and resulted in measurable YOY increase in traffic. A key part of this success was adding relevant, high production value video content. We used the same strategy to repeated this kind of success on our job seeker reviews page.

We also redesigned our SEM landing page which increased registration rate by +26% and responder rate by +21% over the control—and also increased MAU by +1.2%.

Credits

Design: Erik Arildsson, Christina Van Lepp, Olivier Ifrah
Engineering: Weston Radcliffe, Jeff Wei, Allyson Wessman
Creative Ops: Jenn Yang