Overview

Medium is a publishing platform geared toward high-quality content, original ideas, clean reading experience, engagement and depth, and having a viewpoint. They strip away all clutter (ie, ads and pop-ups, clickbait), and leave you with a minimalistic, clean and sophisticated look. We created a job board that will align with those values as well as continue to grow its network and profit.

Role & Duration

• 2 weeks, Team of four UX designers

• Project Manager, Market Research, Interviews

• Created bio & job listings pages

• Assisted Visuals

The Problem

Medium has been focusing on optimizing the time users spend reading on Medium rather than maximizing the size of its audience. Keeping to a clean and minimal esthetic, Medium doesn’t display ads, pop-ups or click-bait. They make profit from a $5 a month subscription from users. 

The Solution

By creating a job board feature we hope to use this as a vehicle to become more profitable as well as keeping people involved with the product. By adding career resources we will expand this already reputable website and continue to expand their network.

Researching Medium

• 95% of Medium’s readers are college graduates

• With 43% of them earning six figures or more

• Over half of them are between 18–34 years old 

• The largest overall demographic is highly educated, males in the tech industry

User Interviews

24 users participated in our survey and shared their experiences using job boards

Indeed was used most at 88%, and LinkedIn at 80%.

The biggest motivator for using job boards was finding new jobs, which inspired the “growth & community” section to be developed in future steps.

What features motivate users to use one job board over the other?

• How much I have to fill out

• Quality of jobs offered & how relevant the jobs were to their searches

• Volume of ads, minimal link out

  Citations

Features important to our user:

• Company reviews

• Filters and more selections focused on their industry

• Saving jobs

• Quality over quantity

• Duration of job posting

Design Studio

A team of 4 designers set a timer for 5 minutes and produced as many iterations as possible. This process helped four designers come together to get ideas flowing and help everyone get on the same page for wireframing.

What were the takeaways?

• The bio page

• A page for career development

• A job listings page

• This would be a built in feature to the current app

Yoshi filling out his bio page

Click to view the job board app!

Next Steps

• Build out the “Grow” section (ie, Mentor/Mentee, Workshops, Trainings, Learning, MeetUps, Ted Talks, etc)

• In the “Grow” section - Do you want to buff up your resume? Get a call from an advisor

• Follow up reminders from Medium to reach out to employers

• Add notifications to suitcase icon, to imply you have a new message

• Apply dark mode feature

Lessons learned

Refection:

Looking back, the ideation phase (ie, Design Studio) was my favorite part of this project. Getting to collaborate with other designers really helps to get the ideas flowing. I learned a lot about being a Project Manager. My skills as a fitness coach came in handy when stress and pressure were high. I really enjoyed motivating my fellow designers and encouraging them through the process. I learned a lot about organizing deliverables and setting time restraints. With four designers on the team, ideas would come in right and left. I have a “big picture” point of view, which was important when it was crunch time and we needed to produce our prototype.

I learned about setting clear expectations, especially when the prototype needed to be up and running. We ran behind the last couple of days, which rushed our preparation for our presentation. Since presenting is very important to me, it would have been nice to have an extra day to practice timing and structure.