Indeed

Many of Indeed's job listings were scraped from public listing boards. We treated them equally as a service to our customers, but they fell short in one major area: the user had to enter all information manually. On a desktop computer this is frustrating and tedious, but it's at least a straightforward process. Now imagine that on your phone. It's torture.

A product team at Indeed figured out something that was simple and amazing. Our mobile app, on both iOS and Android, opened these non-Indeed job listings in an in-app webview. Because you never left the app, the user still had access to their data - we simply needed to make it available to the web page. In a normal browser, this would be done via a plugin, but this requires the user to download and install a plugin, authenticate, and pray that this plugin wasn't stealing their data.

This team realized they could create an overlay in the in-app webview that would be triggered then the user focused on an input field. They could allow the user to select any field from their résumé, and input it with a tap.

I was asked to refine this feature and create a prototype that could be used for research and testing. We wanted to ensure this feature was usable by our jobseekers. I explored a few different UIs for exploring the résumé, selecting data, as well as potential enhancements for future versions to speed this - things like automatically detecting which field was selected in the application, and creating a shortcut to the appropriate section of the résumé.

Our testing showed users had few problems with the functionality of the new UI. However, trust became a primary sticking point. Users had questions about what information would be transmitted, and in which circumstances. Although the privacy and trust concerns did not reach the degree of concerns we saw around browser plugins, they were significant enough that we added communication into the final UX recommendations.