Robota
How might we help Ukrainian refugees find work in an easy and efficient way?
My team and I were thrilled to be announced as both the winner and crowd favorite team at General Assembly's 2022 International Aid Hackathon!
Team
UX Designers
Eva Regelski Lizzie Bridges
Front End Engineers
Bianca Joseph Jamel Fadel Roman Protoliuk
Back End Engineers
Anthony Kowalkowski Daniel Ribuffo Renee Skibinski
Role
Lead UX Researcher & Designer
Timeline
3 day sprint
Tools
Figma
Procreate
MERN Stack
Deliverables
High-fidelity mobile website
Ukrainian Refugee Situation
For the International Aid Hackathon, our team of two UX designers and 6 software engineers worked together for 3 days to help solve an extremely important issue that affects so many people today.
We knew our team was tasked with building something to help with the situation in Ukraine, but we wanted to do some more research to figure out the biggest issues that refugees are facing today.
Washington State
Highest number of Ukrainian refugees in the US
Need for Jobs
Many refugees are struggling to find work
We learned that the state of Washington has the highest number of Ukrainian refugees out of any other state in the country. This helped bring our focus in, geographically speaking.
Next, we did some research on the main problems that Ukrainian refugees in Washington were facing. Through this, we found out that while many refugees are finding places to stay and have food and water, it is really hard for them to find work.
Problem
This brought us to our main problem: Ukrainian refugees in Washington need an easy and efficient way to search and apply for jobs, so that they can quickly re-enter the workforce.
We also wanted to think about the fact that many employers in Washington also want to help Ukrainian refugees by hiring task-based and professional workers.
Research
Discovering the problem
We chose to focus on two main research methods to inform our design decisions. For these, we conducted user interviews as well as a task analysis of another job hunting platform.
User Interviews
Task Analysis
Task Analysis
Indeed
For our competitive task analysis, we looked at the process of searching for a job and saving that job, on the platform: Indeed. This task analysis would help us construct our user flow later on in the design process.
User Interview Takeaways
6 Participants
We interviewed 6 people who are either Ukrainian refugees or recently went through the job hunting process in order to figure out their likes and pain points with it. Our 4 main takeaways were:
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Users found it difficult to find relevant jobs
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They want to be able to use their phones for job searching on the go
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They want location based job searches
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Users want more options for search criteria
Understanding the Users
In an effort to learn more about the needs and concerns of our targeted users, I developed a proto-persona that we would be designing the platform for.
User Persona
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Names: Katerina
Age: 35
Location: Seattle
Status: Married, two kids
Frustrations:
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Not finding the right type of job
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Can't keep track of jobs
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Hard to find jobs near her
Goals:
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Provide for her kids
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Find a full-time job
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Start working ASAP
Katerina is a 35 year old, mother of two. She recently evacuated Ukraine in the midst of the Russian invasion, and now resides in Seattle, Washington, having to leave behind her husband, as many refugees do. Since she was uprooted from her home and now lives in a new country with two kids to support, she needs to find a new job quickly.
User Flow
Searching and saving a job
After defining our persona, we created a simple user flow of the process of searching and saving a job, taking into account what we learned from our task analysis of Indeed.
Sketching
After creating our main user flow, I sketched out the main pages we would need on our website.
I made the decision that we should build mobile-first for the site. This is due to the fact that, thinking about our target users, many of them have easier and more consistent access to smartphones than they do computers.
Wireframes
Key Features
Searching and Saving Jobs
After sketching, I moved into creating simple, mid-fidelity wireframes, but I want to show you some of our key design features with our polished, high-fidelity wireframes.
Some of the main features to note here is that it's really easy to search by some of the top industries that are hiring Ukrainian refugees, in addition to typing in the search bar.
And we also wanted to make it quick and easy to save jobs, as that was something we found out in our user interviews.
Job Posting and Saved Jobs
When clicking in to see more about a job, we prioritized the key details and benefits that would be helpful for refugees to know. For example here, users can quickly see that the job is part-time and that it offers child care, something that is very important to all of the refugees with children.
And we also designed a quick access button for saved jobs on the navigation bar for users to access from any screen on the site.
Usability Testing
We were able to conduct 1 usability test on our high-fidelity wireframes due to time and developer constraints. We asked users to search for chef jobs in Seattle, find out more details about the job, save that job, and navigate to their saved jobs.
Usability Testing Results
Main Takeaway:
Accessibility
The main takeaway we found is that we had an accessibility issue with the text being too small in certain areas, including the logo. This is an important issue to fix because many Ukrainian refugees are older and don't have the best eyesight, so this is something that we wanted to change.
Next Steps
Translation Toggle
Filter Options
More Testing
If we were to continue working on this website, our team would want to focus on a few key things that we weren't able to get to due to time constraints.
First, we want to add a translation toggle on the site that would allow users to seamlessly swap back and forth between English, Ukrainian, and any other languages users need.
We also want to add more filter options so that users can filter through jobs using more specific criteria, which will hopefully make the job search much easier.
Lastly, we want to conduct more usability test so that we can confirm our assumptions and design decisions.
To test out the site for yourself, please use the button below!
Please note that the site will work on both mobile and desktop browsers, but it's only optimized for mobile, currently.
Thanks for reading!