Supporting candidates through a refined Homepage experience

SEEK Asia incorporates the JobsDB and JobStreet, two brands that operate throughout South East Asia. As part of a push to uplift design for candidates' key touch points, the business wanted to refine the Homepage design for the JobsDB brand.

This case study goes through the process of understanding what to include in the Homepage, research activities, design iterations, and optimisation of final designs to hit parity with key metrics.

Initially, stakeholders favoured a specific solution – using a horizontal list of thematic rows similar to Netflix. However, we pushed for a more human-centred approach, incorporating both generative and evaluative research activities to help inform decisions.

Starting with generative research, we probed candidate perceptions of the Homepage. We followed this with numerous co-design sessions with stakeholders, after which we conducted another research session. This was aimed to both evaluate updated concepts, as well as assess the old Homepage experience. This led to final optimisation of the designs in production through continuous experimentation.

One of the key highlights for this project, was the framing of the Homepage as a complement to the usual job seeking experience. Based on our user-centred insights, we recommended adding extra personalisation to the Homepage (e.g., Profile data), as well as address issues of transparency and control related to recommendations.

The mixed-methods testing approaches we also used – and that I led – proved to be efficient in capturing actionable insights at speed. For example, working in parallel we managed to test both usability of our concepts, as well as pinpoint user pain points in the legacy Homepage.

We also faced several key challenges that required continuous optimisation. For example, we saw a 5% drop in Apply Starts for logged-in users. This meant revising our original designs and rethink some of the patterns we were using, namely horizontal thematic lists.

Serving millions of candidates, our changes to the Homepage were widely successful. We achieved a 8% uptick in Apply Starts, while decreasing our bounce rate by 13%. These are key metrics that the business uses to assess success.

However, we also saw a drop of 5% in Apply Starts for logged-in users. Our analysis showed this was due to the use of horizontal thematic rows for showing recommended jobs. Despite addressing usability issues through testing, these rows proved a sub-optimal solution for scanning, quick decision-making, and conversion.

After several rounds of optimisation, we recommended replacing the thematic rows with a grid of items. This resulted in achieving Apply Start parity with the previous version of the Homepage.