Job Postings CMS
A customizable job postings CMS for Career Services/Co-op staff and students.
The “Career Services Manager” (CSM) system, created by Symplicity, is a customizable job postings system for university career services and cooperative education departments to appropriate to their services and requirements. Over an eight month Co-op term, I took on the task of this appropriation and customization for Simon Fraser University’s Work Integrated Learning department. This involved integrating existing data from a large job postings database, and allowing for three major sub-departments, each with different needs, to share the system. I employed a variety of UX best practices to accomplish this goal.
Process
Familiarity with the system’s capabilities was crucial, so I spent time early on trying out typical tasks, discovering the limitations of how the system could be changed, and comparing functionality between this system and the previous one. The system was not live, so making real changes to it was my way of “prototyping” solutions.
After holding large meetings with representation from all of the departments to discuss needs and priorities, I began meeting individual staff members to observe their use of the old system, ask questions pertaining to what requirements they have, and gain insight.I went through many iterations of gathering requirements, implementing them as best as possible, then running usability testing sessions with users again, to get them to try the new system in a real context, observe their actions, and use the insight gained from this to refine it further. Eventually, I reached a point where the customization was optimized, and set out to document my efforts.
The expansion and juxtapositioning of WIL’s services created a significant increase in their use, including a 60% increase in Co-op applications after one semester of use. Most staff members at WIL have expressed that their pain points have been greatly reduced in comparison to the old system, and even to the initial version of the new one, prior to my customization process. My expertise in this system led to being hired to 2 internships at other academic institutions over the next 4 years, where I performed similar duties on existing, live CSM systems that needed to be improved.
Information Architecture:
My main contribution through design skills was improving the information architecture of fields, and pages containing fields. For example, I changed the “Majors” field from a long menu of single degrees, to a hierarchy that first contains faculties (there were only seven at SFU at the time), then branches out into the major degrees for each faculty.
I often restructured profile pages and job posting templates to organize fields together (all Co-op information together, all academic information together and in the order one would expect), and even added HTML code on occasion, if a need came up (I changed one heading’s colour to red in “Interviews” to highlight the student’s interview status, ensuring they would see that vital information).
In my user study sessions, I focused on heuristic evaluation of the tasks users were performing. I watched for what elements were visible when needed and which weren’t, how the order and position of elements within the site’s architecture affected their ability to find what they were looking for, and most important of all, whether the system was behaving they way users expected or not, and if not, then why not?
Running large stakeholder meetings fell to me, since I was most familiar with the system, and had the necessary communication skills. I held discussions with users and training sessions for faculty and students, presented my work so as to be clearly understood, and answered questions about the design decisions I made. These responsibilities are familiar for me, so I excelled at them.
At the end of my term, I wrote detailed and useful guides to document changes and guide users if they were to get lost or need to do something they did not know the process for. My ability to write non-technical guides for technical systems was described as “a gift” by one of my co-workers.
- Simon Fraser University - Work Integrated Learning (WIL) - Co-op Job
- April-December 2008