Client
Friday Media Group
Industries
Education, Legal, HR, B2C
Date
January 2022
The Simply Law job board platform aimed to modernize its blog, targeting a younger demographic of legal professionals, particularly students and apprentices. The project focused on rebranding and creating a platform to create a more engaging, community-centric experience.
As the lead designer, my responsibilities encompassed design thinking workshops, establishing the branding reference and re-doing the UI/UX from a baseline project they had. All to guide the product's vision of delivering value on their job board site long-term.
Design & Prototyping: Adobe Creative Suite, Figma
Collaboration & Project Management: Slack, Clickup
User Research & Testing: Miro, Maze, Google Analytics & Hangouts
We recognized the old blog was outdated and did not resonate with the younger generation. The site needed a fresher, more dynamic design to appeal to students and those entering the legal field through apprenticeships or school programs. There was a need for them to connect.
We performed a series of interviews with students to gain insights into their career paths challenges and interests. These helped us creating a top level persona, guiding the UI/UX design process.
I conducted workshops with the marketing team to visualise user personas and develop content trees, ensuring the new design and content strategy aligned with user needs and preferences.
On first phases of the project I created different wireframes to visualise navigation patterns, key to structure the different categories and levels needed.
Rebranding and Design Strategy
We established a new visual language consisting of an abstract, collage style and a vibrant and accessible color palette. These helped us with the job boards' platform design system constraints, enforcing a new brand identity.
We served ourselves from them on several product touchpoints, enlivening the user flows and UI.
Community platform
The old blog was a rigid website, whereas the new platform considered forums for users to interact with apart from static articles.
For the forum to be properly maintained we designed a hierarchical structure (Categories > Topics > Discussions > Comments) to facilitate organized and meaningful conversations.
We also enabled anonymous posting to encourage participation from students and early career individuals seeking discreet advice.
There was a key emphasis on sharing functionality for broader engagement, so we put our product efforts into easily sharing articles.
The job listings embedded within certain articles allowed us to convert readers into applications for the job site.
Onboarding experience
The starting point was user-centric registration and onboarding flow, with an easygoing approach.
At this stage there were collected user interests and career goals to tailor their content feed, enhancing user engagement and relevance.
We served ourselves with the new style to cheer up the joining form and deliver a good UX.
Responsive Design
During research it came out at what kind of moments users were likely to be browsing content and mobile came as a main touchpoint. Google Analytics validated this with data, so we ensured the platform was visually appealing and functional across various devices, especially on mobile. Most of our users were browsing from their phones and some conversations about a Progressive web app happened during that time but the project undertook another direction based on time constraints.
Enhanced user experience
The rebranding and targeted UI/UX improvements led to increased engagement and time spent on the site increased by 23%.
User database increase
The newly introduced registration and onboarding process effectively attracted a younger audience, enriching the talent pool for 25-30 years old range by +6%.
Social media growth and product sunset
The integrated content strategy and refreshed design approach substantially boosted social media following and engagement by a 64%.
Product sunset
Unfortunately, the Forum part of the community had low engagement and it was shut down in 2023.