Design 1

Ben, a recruiter for a Software company, is looking for Software Developers at MIT. Thus, he goes to the MITJobs homepage (figure 1). Since it is the first time that he is accessing MITJobs website, he does not have an MIT certificate. He signs up using the form shown on the right.

After singing up Ben enters a new webpage (figure 2a). He wants to create a new post and thus he presses the button “Create Post”, which is at the top-right of the page.

Then an overlaid webpage (3b) appears in front. Ben fills in all the necessary information about the job opportunity and saves it. While creating the post there is no "Message" button at the top. This is only for people browsing the posts to contact recruiters or for recruiters to message people following the post.

Alyssa, an undergraduate student in Computer Science, is looking for a Job in Software Development. She enters the MITJobs homepage and since she has an MIT Certificate, she can directly signs in by a single click, after which she is forwarded to webpage 2a.

She wants to browse the job posts and thus she chooses the necessary information to search for job posts. She chooses the type as internship, the course as Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and in the Job Group she chooses Software and also Hardware. She presses search and she is forwarded to page 2b.


At this stage, she browses the job posts, where there is a small description of every job. When she finds some nice job description, she clicks on it. After she clicks, an overlaid page with the description of the job post appears (just like the one in 3b, but without the save button).

Alyssa decides to contact Ben to inquire about the posting, and get some more details about the project. At the post (3b) she presses the button “Message”, then she is redirected to page 4c, with the information of the recipient filled. She then writes her message, and sends a new message.

She then receives a reply from Ben. The list of messages in the inbox is similar to the list of posts in page 2b. On clicking a message, it is displayed as an overlay object, which looks like page 4b. Using messages, Ben and Alyssa set up a meeting.

In the meantime, Dragos, an undergraduate at MIT who has already interviewed with another company,wants to only keep up with the updates from Ben’s job post. He signs into the website with his MIT certificate, browses the job opportunities and then chooses to follow Ben’s job post.

After having the interview with Alyssa, Ben is still undecided about whether his company should hire Alyssa. He goes to the “My Posts” tab (which is shown in Figure 3a). He chooses the post about the Software Development position under “My posts” and then an overlaid webpage (3b) appears and then he edits the deadline to apply and saves it.

After some days, Dragos enters again in the website and then chooses the tab “My Posts” (3a). He sees under “Posts I am following” that there is an update in Ben’s post. He clicks it and then an overlaid page with the post. The post contains the updated details enhanced.

 Ben then decides that Alyssa will fill the position, and sends an update to all followers of the post (by going to  that the position is closed. Dragos receives an update regarding the same.

 

Design Analysis

Learnability:

The interface is easy to learn since it uses several common affordances. The homepage is very similar to some webpages to social networks that are widely used, like Facebook, Twitter and Gmail. The tabs resemble the organization of a webrowser.

Efficiency:

This design is very efficient, since the user is on average three clicks away from whatever information he/she needs. For example; to sign in or sign up, to choose the right tab, and to choose the relevant information within the tab. The only problem is that the user needs to sign in every time that enters in the website, which makes the website less efficient. We could work around this by making it such that a user can choose to “stay logged on”. Also, since filtering posts is allowed while browsing using the tab on the left, MIT users may be directly logged into the "Browse" page and can filter things directly from there. However, this might affect learnability.

Visibility:

The main executable tasks are at the top of the page, right after the “MIT Jobs” logo. If the user needs to do some task related to messaging, posting or browsing, there is a clear tab indicating them. Also, for an employer, the button to create a post is always visible at the top-right of the page, making it very simple to the employer to create a post.

There is the problem when reading posts or messages. These are displaed as overlay objects on the browser. Since the message or post is over the screen, nothing can be done on the site other than editing the post or message on the website. But when replying to messages, the old messages is always appended at the end of the reply, so the user knows what is the content of the original message.

Error Prevention:

The buttons have a clear description of the actions they trigger (like delete or follow). When creating a post, a recruiter can just close the overlay object to discard, but it might be better to actually include a “Discard” button. Similarly for the creation of a message, we had envisioned closing the overlay object to discard the message, but it might provide more affordance to the user if we put a “Discard” button in this case also.

 

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