Indeed Review Integration
Project Overview
Duration: Apr 2020 - Jun 2020 (3 months)
Role: Design Lead
Team collaboration:
Product, Engineering, Product Marketing
Project Status: Launched
Keywords: Aggregation, Filtering, Data Visualization
Since 2020, Glassdoor is more closely partnering with the sister company Indeed, in order to provide better experience for job seekers and employers. This project was the first feature launched in Sept 2020 for the partnership.
Problems & Opportunities
User Painpoints
We learned that employer partners are increasingly focused on improving their talent experience and employer brand, and there is a high demand to help identify strengths and gaps. This gap creates a burden on talent teams to manually aggregate and synthesize large amounts of review data, making it harder for employers to access the information they need to take action and improve.
I need to read and analyze reviews from couple platforms,
Business Opportunities
Foundation for Glassdoor & Indeed Integrated Branding Solution
More review volume will enable more valid insights analytics
Enable Go-to-market team cross-selling of bundled employer profiles
Help employers to access their Glassdoor and Indeed reviews in one place?
Solutions
Original Page -- Only Glassdoor Reviews
The original page was very simple -- 10 Glassdoor reviews per page with the filtering and sorting functionality. There's also FAQ and related analytics links on the right.
After Aggregation
Glassdoor Reviews
In the redesign, I chose tabs for the navigation of Glassdoor & Indeed reviews, and also the review comparison analytics. Filters were separated into global filters and page-level filters since filtering functionalities supported by Glassdoor & Indeed are different.
Indeed Reviews
On the Indeed review page, the general layout is aligned with Glassdoor reviews. In the review cell, the Indeed branding is kept. In order to assure the correct Indeed profile is linked here, we also added an Indeed profile module.
Review Comparison
Besides the original requirement of adding Indeed reviews to Glassdoor Employer Center,
I initiated an idea of including a rating and demographics comparison for both platforms, which was later confirmed by users and the customer success team to be very helpful.
Design Process
Pattern Research
Goals &
Requirements
When I first got this project, the requirement from my product partner is simple
Designing a way to integrate reviews from other platforms (Indeed for MVP, eventually other platforms like Kununu as well) in Glassdoor Employer Center, so that
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It's easier for employers to manage their reviews on one platform
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It could pave the way for future sentiment analysis of reviews
In order to learn more about the existing patterns of information aggregation, I did pattern research on 10+ products. (some people call it competitive analysis but I feel pattern research is more accurate here)
Switch to see the analysis of the selected products
Key Findings
The reviews from multiple resources are organized in two ways--
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Viewing by different providers
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Viewing a single list with mixed providers.
The providers are indicated by tabs or buttons when reviews are shown by different providers.
For the single list of reviews, a column of images or names is normally used to show the providers.
Phase 1 - MVP (FY21)
Phase 2 (FY21)
Phase 3 (FY22)
Indeed reviews available in Employer Center
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Kununu reviews available in the EC
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Respond to Indeed reviews
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Reviews from more sites, pending customer feedback
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Sentiment Analysis
Why are we doing this project? What's the future plan for this project?
What pattern should we use in this project?
A single list with reviews from multiple resources
Review Cell Analysis
I was leaning towards the one-list view because it's easier for users to scan, read and manage. After discussing with my PM partner, we both agreed that the single list is the pattern that we want to move forward with.
Requirement Grooming
Design Iterations
Redesign the review cell to make it compatible with reviews from Indeed (and Kununu)
Compatibility
Keep the future products (Rating Aggregation, Sentiment Analysis) in mind to make it sustainable
Sustainability
Aggregate Indeed reviews in order to make it easy for users to read and manage reviews
Integration
Indeed review cell
Glassdoor review cell
To design a compatible review cell for all platforms, I started with analyzing the similarity and difference of reviews from Glassdoor, Indeed, and Kununu.
What are the conflicts that I might need to solve?
Review data collection comparison
Across Different Platforms
Review Cell Explorations
Current Glassdoor Review Cell
What's the information hierarchy like in the current review cell?
Supporting data comparison
Have the content
Have the content, but shown differently
Not have the content
B
A
D
C
A. Context Info
B. Review Content
C. Rating
D. Action Items
After collecting all the contexts, I started the explorations on the review cell. The goals I want to achieve for the new design is
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Adding the review resource context info
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Rethinking the information hierarchy
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Making the different info easy to hide/tweak so that the engineering team doesn't need to maintain multiple review module styles on one page
Exploration 1 - Minimal change
Resource info
Resource info
Moved the GD unique rating so it's easy to hide
After
Before
Exploration 2 - Star on the right
After
Before
Exploration 3 - Kebab for actions
After
Before
Let star-rating stand out for an easier glance
Group all action items to the kebab menu
Exploration 4 - Title First
After
Before
Prioritize the title (content) of the review
Resource info
Making the decision
How obvious do we wish the resource distinguisher to be?
What's the main focus/purpose of users on this page?
While making the design explorations, I feel there could be a very natural interest in comparing the reviews on both platforms because we are introducing another review resource to our platform. So I made some quick explorations of how we can provide a further context of the aggregation in order to talk with stakeholders.
For all the resource indicator explorations, I feel a major difference is how much emphasis we want to put on this element --
Do we want users to have a fluent reading experience and focus on the content rather than the resource? Or do we want to make it very clear that the reviews came from different platforms? (Risk might be users will be directed to other platforms)
After bringing these questions to my PM partner, we decided to get some feedback from leadership in the later review session.
Employee Reviews Feature Engagement in last 3 months
The design decision should always be tied back to user goals. While I was exploring, I began to ask this very important question -- what tasks do users want to finish?
So I talked to the data scientist on our team and got some engagement data
Data Analysis
What's beyond review cell? -- Comparison
What else users might feel helpful with the aggregation?
From the above chart, we are able to see that the main tasks users take on this page are viewing and responding to reviews. So I decided to move forward with exploration 4, which focuses on the review content and further collect user feedback in usability testing sessions.
Feedback Collection
User Feedback
Product Mkting & Customer Success
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From the business point, it's better to call out the review resource becuase the review quality might vary among platforms
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The comparison is a great add-on but we'll need to be cautious about what we compare so that we don't hurt our brand image
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We might want to include information why there is such an aggregation and communicate the benefits in order to avoid confusion.
Product & Design Leadership
Before testing with users, I presented the design to the product & design leadership, and also product marketing & Customer Success coworkers first in order to re-assure the direction. Here are the major feedbacks.
Stakeholder Feedback
Based on the stakeholder feedback, I made some iterations and made the prototype below to test with users.
Our research team conducted moderated testing with 5 employers.
In general, users were happy to see the integration because it's easier to read and respond to reviews. Users also showed great interest in the comparison information.
But there's one very interesting and important finding that we never assumed --
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Glassdoor reviews
Read new reviews and respond to those. They also download and analyze reviews of specific location/job function in order to report to according stakeholders
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Indeed reviews
Normally won't read through, scan for any keywords with alerts.
Users treat reviews on Glassdoor and Indeed differently.
🤔
+
This project was paused after the usability interview because there was some new business strategy discussion that needed to be finished first.
Later, it was announced that Glassdoor is going to collaborate more widely with Indeed on employer branding. This project was chosen to be the first aggregation feature that we will launch for both Glassdoor and Indeed employers.
Rethinking the direction
New Business Strategy
What pattern should we use in this project?
Viewing by different review resources
A single list with reviews from multiple resources
I ended up leaning towards showing Glassdoor reviews and Indeed reviews seperately because
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When users are trying to achieve different goals with these two reviews, a mixed list of reviews won't help.
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Since this feature is the first feature that will be launched for Glassdoor & Indeed collaboration, I should find a pattern that works for the upcoming feature aggregations.
In order to iterate based on user testing findings and the new business strategy, I began to take a step back and see if the mixed list is still the most effective pattern.
Final Designs
Results
Reflection
For the sake of your finger that keeps scrolling, I won't expand on the detailed process how I went from the original direction to the current one, but will briefly walk through some thoughts in the final design 😺
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This feature was officially launched in Sept 2020 as the first feature of Glassdoor&Indeed collaboration.
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Indeed review page was ranked as the top 5 visited page in Employer Center
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The pattern of using tabs to distinguish Glassdoor & Indeed data was adopted by other projects and features.
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Even for business-initiated projects, always dig why users might need this feature and how they will use it.
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Don't be afriad of wrong directions because that's what we can learn from. Design process is never linear so just be open-minded and try to deal with the ambiguity.
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Designers CAN impact product decisions. All it needs is the ownership and thourough thoughts on the problem space.