Wired
Project Length: 10 weeks
Roles: UX/UI Designer, Content Designer, User Researcher
Tools: Figma, Miro
Overview
Wired is a candidate management platform designed to help hiring managers and recruiters identify and organize top candidates more efficiently. Collaborating with a team of three designers, I focused on simplifying user flows and creating intuitive content structures to streamline the hiring process.
Challenge
Recruiters often manage large candidate pools across disconnected systems, making it difficult to track progress, coordinate interviews, and evaluate fit. Smaller companies lacking applicant tracking systems (ATS) face additional inefficiencies in managing their pipelines.
Research and Insights
Our team conducted eight interviews with recruiters, hiring managers, and HR professionals from both large and small organizations. We discovered that smaller companies rely heavily on referrals and manual tracking, while larger organizations use ATS but still struggle with coordination and bias.
In-class usability testing with paper prototypes revealed confusion around navigation and task flow, helping us identify where key features needed clearer visual and interaction cues.
Solution
We redesigned the candidate management flow to focus on simplicity and clarity. The new interface included a unified dashboard for tracking candidates, improved filtering tools, and clear action pathways for scheduling interviews and assembling panels. I contributed to the information hierarchy, interface layout, and user task mapping.
Impact
The redesigned flow reduced the number of steps to complete core tasks and improved user understanding during testing. Feedback indicated that recruiters found the interface more intuitive and easier to navigate compared to the original concept.
Key Learnings
Conduct additional usability testing with a high-fidelity prototype to validate the revised design and further refine interactions.
Design Process
We created a competitor diamond to map how other businesses compared to ours, highlighting similarities and differences and identifying opportunities to differentiate our product in the market.
We created a magic quadrant using the same competitors to better understand their positions and identify opportunities to differentiate our product.
I researched three companies using a comparison matrix to identify trends and gaps in their offerings. This insight helped inform which features and services to include in our candidate management platform.
I participated in a Crazy 8 exercise, rapidly generating multiple layout ideas with one minute per screen to explore design possibilities.
Following the Crazy 8 exercise, I selected three screens to develop into solution sketches based on team feedback. This step allowed for more intentional design decisions and a clearer focus on the user journey.
Our team chose neutral tones to create a clean, professional interface. The minimal visual approach allowed more information to be presented on each screen without overwhelming the user.
We created a user journey map to visualize and evaluate the end-to-end user experience. This exercise revealed gaps in our initial prototype and informed targeted design improvements.
