Dice is an online job board established in 1990 catering to tech professionals. In the current job market, online job boards make up 50% of applications. Dice’s design is outdated and provides a user experience that falls short compared to other job boards. This makes Dice a great candidate for a redesign focused on making it a competitive job board.
Despite offering great features, Dice’s outdated design, disorganized structure, and inconsistent content creates a user experience that falls short compared to other job boards and contributes to the stress, time, and self-doubt experienced while looking for new employment opportunities.
The Dice redesign presents consistent, high-quality content in a visually appealing and user-friendly layout, resulting in increased user trust in the job board and boosted self-confidence in users as strong job applicants.
An audit of Dice’s current website revealed several issues with the website’s organization, functionality, and visual design. The designs are inconsistent, outdated, and visually underwhelming. Additionally, job descriptions are inconsistent, making the platform feel unreliable and lacking professionalism.
This underwhelming presentation becomes more evident when compared to the competition. Competitive analysis of popular job boards (Indeed, BuiltIn, The Muse, and Otta) shows that while Dice offers many of the same features they do, it falls short in how it presents these features to users. To be competitive with other job boards, Dice would benefit from a modern, streamlined interface with quality content.
To understand job seekers’ perspective on this issue, I conducted 5 in-depth interviews in which participants walked me through their job hunt process on their preferred job board. While I was unable to interview Dice users, these interviews shed light on the pain points of the job hunt in general. People expressed frustration with the stress of navigating job boards full of unreliable and irrelevant postings, which ultimately led to feelings of self-doubt.
How might we improve Dice to be competitive?
How might we relieve the stress of job searching?
How might we help applicants feel confident in their job search?
The redesign focused on making the Dashboard a more useful page to the user. Consolidating the Recommended Jobs page with the Dashboard simplifies Dice’s structure and adds value to the Dashboard. In the future, the Dashboard can provide more personalized content by showing recommended articles relevant to the user.
Low-fidelity sketches of the mobile and desktop redesign which were tested with 9 participants through usability and A/B testing. This helped determine which design patterns resonated more with users and looked better across devices, feedback which informed high-fidelity designs. High-fidelity designs improved on the existing design system, leveraging brand colors, enhancing components, and ensuring consistency.
The high-fidelity designs were tested with 5 participants and revealed that the Dice redesign made the job board appear more trustworthy, making job seekers feel confident in their job search. The overall visual redesign of the job board was well received, however, results also revealed areas for further improvement in information organization, platform navigation, and component clarity.
Ensuring a smooth and similar user experience between mobile and desktop required difficult design decisions that benefited both formats. The Main Navigation Panel occupied significant space on mobile. The redesign focused on maintaining its functionality while optimizing the layout for mobile to ensure a seamless user experience across all platforms. Information-dense sections like Job Description and User Profile required a specific design pattern to enhance scannability and navigation on mobile. These challenges highlighted the importance of in-depth planning for responsive design to ensure a seamless user experience across all platforms.
Another lesson learned was that information-dense products require additional research into the order of information users expected to see. To further optimize information flow, including card sorting in the research phase would be valuable to understand user expectations about content order.
