Handshake was created to ensure that all college students have equal access to meaningful careers. Handshake’s community includes 20 million students and young alumni around the world from 1,400 educational institutions. The platform connects up-and-coming talent with 650,000+ employers. Our goal was to address usability issues on the homepage, which were impacting user engagement and feature adoption.
The existing homepage was not effectively surfacing relevant events and career fairs, resulting in users having to navigate multiple steps to find opportunities. This led to:
• A cluttered interface that duplicated navigation elements and wasted valuable screen space.
• Low user engagement and high bounce rates due to an intuitive layout and poor feature visibility.
• Negative feedback and high task-completion rates due to a lack of clarity and prioritization in the interface.
As the lead designer, I collaborated with a content strategist to overhaul the information architecture. I also partnered with a project manager, copywriter, and a team of eight engineers implement a complete redesign of the homepage. My responsibilities included redesigning, testing, building, and launching the revamped homepage. I also led a design sprint to align with cross-functional teams and stakeholders.
Handshakes platform consists of a three sided marketplace with students, educational institutions and employers. Structuring the student platform in a way that best served student job hunters was the first priority, but also required taking into account the needs of the other two marketplaces.
Performing a product audit included user interviews across our user personas. We also had conversations with key stakeholders across the company to identify pain points and areas of opportunity to set us up for success in the overhaul process.
We spoke to students currently using the platform to reveal pain points and areas of opportunity:
• Users found the platform difficult to navigate compared to their previous experience with similar sites.
• Feedback indicated a need for more intuitive navigation and clearer value communication.
Leveraging learnings from the Information Architecture phase, the work on the web homepage began. As this project included a high-touch surface area of the product we needed to ensure that cross-functional partners and leadership were looped in early to ensure good outcomes. I designed and led a week-long design sprint with a core team of designers, engineers, a project manager and engineers. We spoke to cross-functional partners and stakeholders and leadership to understand the three-sided marketplace, identify opportunities, blockers and ensure that our solutions aligned with business goals.
As the homepage of the product is a high touch and high visibility surface area the redesign effected many stakeholders across the three sided marketplace. In planning the project extra care was taken to loop in leadership and cross-functional partners early and often to ensure a smooth process. This began with a foundational step of establishing north star principles for the web homepage moving forward:
North Star Principals - Empathetically guide students through personalized steps and connections that help them achieve career success.
Directive - Students know what they need to do to be successful on our product
Inspirational - We inspire students to take action rather than increase anxiety around job search
Human - There are people on the product that care about helping students find opportunities
Fresh - There are new things to see and students come back because they find value
Scalable - Works across different types of students, institutions, career journeys
We conducted two rounds of prototype testing to iteratively refine our approach. Our users varied in levels of experiences in job search from college freshmen to the doctoral level. Speaking to users across our user segments was critical in building out user segments for customized homepage experiences to best serve our users. We ultimately landed on a phased roll out to homepage features to best to serve our users and introduce new features to our users.
A task based homepage was built to provide a dynamic homepage to serve users across the job hunting process. By presenting tasks tailored to the user we were able to encourage users to take steps in their job hunt, promote events and highlight features as well as collect data to increase student matchability.
Layering in the human elements and tying jobs and events to recruiters on the platform clearly communicated the value of the platform beyond just jobs. The addition of social elements, personalized collections and interactivity shifted the homepage experience from being perceived as a static job board to a dynamic and robust marketplace.
A phased approach suited this project well as we were able to gain sights from user data and apply those learnings to additional features. An initial set of user tasks and collections were shipped and subsequent content ittereated on those initial steps and shifted to suit OKRs and business goals in following quarters.
• Improved user engagement and reduced bounce rates.
• Enhanced feature adoption through clearer value communication and personalized content.
• Increased task completion rates and positive feedback from users.
