Mobile App for Job Seekers: Visual Exploration Case Study

visual exploration: verified! a mobile app

creating a mobile concept car

Problem: There is a high rate of fraud in resumes. Many candidates falsify their education or employment credentials, and employers face exposure, time, and costs if they don't screen candidates properly. Education fraud is especially high, yet only half of employers verify education.

One of the apps that I worked on at First Advantage is an app called Verified, which disrupts screening and verifications for hiring companies by providing near instant verification on data that is difficult to verify so that business decisions can be made faster. Our tagline is to “put people to work faster by giving them control and visibility over their personal data”.

I worked with my CIO as well as a product manager on this product, and I helped to further the strategy for this app that was once an idea without a face for one year.
We began with a brainstorming session and created a mind map for the value proposition of Verified:

I chose to focus on visual design for this product as there was already prior market research done.

Once my CIO, product manager, and I decided on the requirements for this app, I started with hand drawn sketches as per usual.

Once I iterated on the sketches based on comments received on UXPin, I decided to create a visual mood board by collecting screenshots of various mobile apps on the market that demonstrate visually pleasing aesthetics and intuitive design. Initially, I wanted to keep my options open but made sure to choose app designs that portray our app’s values: trust, safety, ease, and security.

I grouped these into categories such as “Blue and White, Content Heavy, Heavy Interactions” etc and spread them out on a scale of Cool to Warm colors, Light to Heavy content. I also made comments of the key attributes of each app:

After speaking through this visual board to my CIO and product manager, I asked them to identify three of their favorite apps from this board, and I laid out the attributes of the three and created style guides for each of the apps:

We then determined that the next steps would be to create high-fidelity mockups of our app’s sketches through using the style guides of the three chosen apps: Ring, Current, and Uber:

We decided we liked the white and blue theme the best, as blue is a color that is commonly known to portray calm, trust, and openness, which align with the values of our app.

After we decided on blue and white, I created three different versions of blue and white mockups, with different style guides but same content.

Next, I sought feedback from my CIO (Dan) and PM (Tammie) on these iterations. As you can see, our next step was to show customers, which we planned with Dan.

I met with my CIO and PM again to discuss the progress and they provided comments on UX Pin for my next iteration:

Learnings

- With such a complex problem, it was tempting to stay in the discovery phase initially, but once aligning on our vision statement and key attributes, I found it helpful to dive in with simple sketches to align on the vision of the app.

- There were many feature ideas that came up as we solidified our vision for the app, but it’s important to stay within MVP parameters and saving ‘V2’ goals for the backlog.

- Making as many iterations as possible and seeking feedback often is key, especially for a net-new product.

- Overall, this was one of the projects at FADV that was able to gain a lot of traction for design and I was able to share the importance of design thinking in product strategy.

clickable prototype (in progress)

I added interactions in UXPin to make the app look and feel more ‘real’. Keep in mind this is still a concept car so not all features are functional at this point!

Next Steps

• Prototype Test

• Analyze feedback from Protype Test

• Regroup with PM and CIO to determine next steps