✦ Currently responsible for designing the core software product for the company, a web application used by small and medium-sized clinics and hospitals across the USA. The application is used for insurance verification process and generating accurate insurance estimates for patients.

✦ Also responsible for updating and designing the company's website on Webflow.

Linkedin is the go to platform for hiring talents and finding jobs. As of December 2023, LinkedIn had 330 million users, effectively bridging the gap between job seekers and recruiters.

However it has a lot of scope for making the user experience better for recruiters and job seekers. In this case study I will explain how I improved the linkedin job search and job application tracking experience.

Disclaimer: I do not have access to data about the recruiter app or the applicant app, nor do I know how decisions regarding the current design were made.

Therefore, while designing I have tried my best to not change the existing UI or user flow a lot.

Since I'm not a recruiter, I chose to focus on enhancing the job seeker's experience, as they are the primary users of LinkedIn.

But in doing so I worked on improving the recruiter side of the app as well.

The problem can be divided in 2 parts ‘Before applying for a job’ and ‘After applying for a job’.

Like I mentioned, improving the applicant's experience also made me work on improving the recruiter's side of the app as well, so I will proceed with that.

Problems ‘Before applying to a job’

It will be fixed by making the changes in the recruiter’s user flow for posting a job.

Step 1 for the recruiter is adding the job description.

Limiting the characters for each input field and having different input field for different information would make it easy for the applicant to scan this information.

Step 2 for the recruiter is about adding the screening questions. I have not made any changes to that, so moving on to the next step.

Step 3 for the recruiter will be adding the information about salary range, team members and skills.

Step 4 for the recruiter would be adding the details about the interview rounds and recruiting team.

Recruiter can select the mode of interview depending on the interview round.

In the hiring process multiple people might be involved in the recruitment process. Therefore, I created an option for recruiters to add several team members from their team.

The recruiter can grant either edit or view access to others. Those with view access can only see the status of the applicants, while those with edit access can make changes to it.

I will discuss more about it later in the case study.

Now let us see how this will change the job description page for the applicant who is applying for the job.

The applicants can see the details about the interview round. They get an clear idea about the number of interview rounds, what would be the mode of the interview round and description about it.

They can see who are all the team members that they would be working with if they get hired.

Below that they can see rest of the information related to the job, which is shown in the current UI of linkedin.

Problems for Job applicant ‘After applying to a job’

1.&nbsp;No way to know the status of their job application.

2.&nbsp;Lack of communication between the recruiter and applicant.

Problems for Recruiter ‘After posting a job’

1.&nbsp;No way to keep track of applicant’s interview process.

2.&nbsp;No way to communicate internally between the recruiting team.

First let us see the solution for checking the job application status. Currently there are two ways in which a candidate can apply to a job through linkedin

For the applicant to check their status, recruiter should be able to update the applicant’s status.

Currently the recruiter can only see the details about candidate’s past experience and their resume.

In the new design recruiter can also see all the information about the interview rounds and keep a track of the stage of the applicant.

Let us take a closer look at the new design.

Rather than showing all the details I have put a ‘See more’ button, so that recruiter don’t have to scroll a lot to check other information about the applicant.

Another problem was lack of communication between the recruiter and the applicant.

Linkedin already has a messaging feature where the applicant can chat with the recruiter. So this problem doesn’t need to be solved from scratch.

But if the recruiter wants to convey anything related to the specific interview round it would be better if they can do it here as it is easy to keep track of it.

So I added a section where recruiter can add any text or document related to the interview round.

The recruiter can change the status of the applicant while conducting the interview rounds. It will have 3 stages: Pending, Ongoing, Complete.&nbsp;

While posting the job, recruiter had added the people who are involved in the recruitment process. Those who have the edit access can change the status of the interview rounds.

If the candidate has completed all the interview rounds and team has decided to hire him, than they will have an option to send an offer letter. Clicking on ‘Send offer letter’ will open the email.

Now let us see how this will affect the applicant’s side of the experience

Let us start with the ‘My Job’ page, the first change will be in the tabs.

It will have 2 new tabs, Easy Apply and Through Website. ‘Easy Apply’ will have jobs where they have applied through ‘Easy Apply’ and ‘Through Website’ will have the jobs where the applicants have applied directly from the company website.

On the job detail page the applicant can see the status of their interview rounds. They can see any information and document provided by recruiter for the interview round.

If the candidate is already selected for a different job they can opt out of the interview process so that recruiter can remove the applicant from their hiring process.

What about jobs for which the applicant has applied through website?

For this jobs it is not possible to keep a track on linkedin but, depending on where they are in the interview process, candidate can change the status themselves and keep a track of different interview rounds.

What if the recruiter doesn’t change the status of the applicant for a long time?

For better user experience for the applicant, the recruiter will be informed when they don’t update status for more then 2 weeks.

If they want to reject the applicant they can reject them by providing the reason.

The applicant can see this in their job activity status

Now coming to the 2nd problem that recruiters face: No way to communicate with team members.

Recruiters can communicate internally while hiring.

But being able to communicate separately about each candidate is important for making the recruitment process easy.

This can be done by having a chat feature where they discuss everything about that candidate.

So that was all about improving the job searching and job tracking process for applicants and recruiters on linkedin. If you have any suggestions about improving this experience I would love to know about it.

Figma file:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.figma.com/design/xTocJwATlCKVSmyv3Omcz4/Linkedin-Project?node-id=0-1&amp;t=vNJawAz2N5Vh7BrX-1">https://www.figma.com/design/xTocJwATlCKVSmyv3Omcz4/Linkedin-Project?node-id=0-1&amp;t=vNJawAz2N5Vh7BrX-1</a>

Improving the Experience of Job Search and Job Application Tracking on Linkedin

I started my design journey at a small agency, they were at a phase where they were doing good business by providing their services and now they were planning to launch their own product.

As the luck would have it, one of their client reached out to them with an interesting problem and that eventually lead us to figure out the solution, build the product and me to write this case study.

The industry exhibition is a huge market. For small and medium scale B2B companies in industries like pharmaceuticals, equipment manufacturing, etc, this exhibitions are a very important place to meet new clients and grow their network.

Exhibition normally has two type of attendees:

Exhibitors: The one who want to sell their products.

Visitors: They are potential customer for exhibitors who would buy their product.

This is what a typical encounter between an exhibitor and a visitor in the exhibition looks like.

Exhibitions like this lasts for 2-3 days and hundreds and thousands of visitors attends this exhibitions.

Company exhibitors participate in numerous exhibitions throughout the year because they need to get new clients and grow their business.

So after talking to numerous exhibitors who frequently attends this exhibitions, we came across 4 core problems that we had to solve.

Wait but can’t they enter the data in an excel sheet during the exhibition itself? 🤔

They can but this exhibitions have a very busy and chaotic environment and the exhibitor or his salesman may not necessarily encounter the client at their booth,  it is easier to quickly note down the visitor's information on a form at that moment.

As an exhibition lasts for only 2-3 days, we knew that exhibitor or his salesman will be working in a very busy and a chaotic environment and would be dealing with so many visitors during the exhibition.

So the focus was on designing the app in such a way that exhibitors can use it without getting distracted by any unnecessary functions.

This was the first version of the app and the business model was subscription based.

Exhibitors who have purchased the subscription, would be provide with the access code to log in to the app.

The user can either be an exhibitor or one of his salesman. Exhibitor will have some additional functionality that I will explain later. All users will have different access code to login.

When we were thinking about how the user can quickly get the visitor’s data, right of the bat we knew that we would need a scanning feature.

And the user should know how to use that.

So once they were logged in, even though users would be aware about the app, it was still a better idea to let them know that they can capture visitor’s data by scanning the card.

During the exhibition the visitor would hand over their visiting card to the exhibitor which would have all the important details that exhibitor needs.

Good thing was that all of these data have different formats. So the developers were able to make the feature in which the app would automatically detect the data according to it’s format.

We tested the scan features on multiple cards with different fonts, colors, design etc. And 7 out of 10 times the data was identified properly. It would always capture the name, email and phone number correctly, but sometimes designation and company name were not detected because they had no specific format.

We figured out a solution for that to. I will discuss that a bit later.

Like I mentioned earlier, the user will use this app in a busy and chaotic environment, so it is important to provide what they need as soon as they open the app.

And what they want is SCANNER 📷, to quickly capture data from the visitor’s card.

After scanning both sides of the card the exhibitor can quickly review the image and proceed further.

Now here we solve the problem that I mentioned earlier

What if any data was not scanned properly and it is inaccurate?

To solve that problem I decided to give the user the option to manually edit the data once it was captured.

I added 2 more options to make the user experience better.

First, What if there is something user wants to note down about the visitor?

So I decided to add a comment field where user can quickly note down something important before saving the information.

Second, as this is a lead, it would be helpful if user can classify them as hot, warm or cold lead. Thus I went ahead and added an option where user can decide the type of the lead.

After a visitor’s data is saved the user will be redirected to the the scanner so that they can immediately scan the next card.

With this the three core problems for the exhibitors are solved.

Problem 1: Manual paper work. Completely eliminated as visitor’s data is simply captured by scanning the visiting card.

Problem 2 : Risk of loosing the data. No papers, no risk of loosing the data. All the information is stored digitally.

Problem 3 : Loosing important time. Exhibitors can scan the card in seconds. Saving a lot of time for networking opportunities with visitors.

From the bottom navigation the user can go to the ‘Leads’ screen and access data of all the scanned visiting cards.&nbsp;

The user can also edit the data of the visitor if needed.

To download this information, user can simply tap on the ‘Export’ button and data of all the visiting card will be downloaded in an excel sheet.

And this solves the 4th core problem of the visitor.

Problem 4: Data entry cost. No data entry cost as the user can directly generate the excel sheet from the app itself.

But what if the exhibitor wants the data of all the visitors of one particular exhibition? 🤔

Well the list is for one exhibition only. Remember the access code through which the a user logs in, that access code will be valid only for one exhibition. The user will get the new access code for new exhibition.

Additional functionalities for the exhibitor

The exhibitors will be leading and managing the team at the exhibitions, he will have multiple salesman working alongside him.

Thus exhibitor will be able to add or delete the salesman and will be able to see how many number of scans are still remaining.

The total number of card that an exhibitor and his team can scan will depend on the plan that they have subscribed for.

A product designer’s job is not just limited to the screens. It involves solving business and user problems that are beyond the screens.

As the product was in the early stage so to get it to the potential customer, the company had decided to go to various exhibitions and directly reach out the clients i.e. exhibitors and show them the product.

So what is the best way to show them the product?

One is to show them the demo, other is to onboard them on the app similar to how they would capture visitor’s data during an exhibition, which would make them trust the product even more and would create a solid first impression.

So I designed a simple onboarding process where we would onboard the client by scanning their visiting card.

Once the card is scanned then we can manually edit the data if there is any inaccuracy.

After selecting their preferred plan and payment method, we would send them the invoice.

The payment is not done through this app, it’s only purpose is to keep the record of the payment method for the company.

So ultimately at the time of onboarding itself we would show the user how Caplead will work for them.

By testing it with few customers we found that

With Caplead, exhibitor’s total cost for each exhibition reduced down to 50%.

For exhibitors it reduced the time to capture the visitor’s data to 20-30 seconds, which earlier required anywhere between 1-5 minutes. Giving them more time to network at the exhibition events.

This was the first time I was working on a real project that was solving a real business problems. I learned that while working on concept you have full liberty to design product according to your vision but while working on real projects the first priority is solving the basic business problem, understanding the technical constraints and working on your design accordingly.

Figma file:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.figma.com/design/xiKh0LGONoP0BQrEkZGWv8/Caplead-Project?node-id=0-1&amp;t=7FCE4lr8wXS7jJa8-1">https://www.figma.com/design/xiKh0LGONoP0BQrEkZGWv8/Caplead-Project?node-id=0-1&amp;t=7FCE4lr8wXS7jJa8-1</a>

Reducing Exhibition Costs and Lead capture time by 50%: A Case Study

People living in metro cities often use their own vehicle when they are travelling in the city.

Problem with using their own vehicle is that many people find it difficult to find a parking place.

However, most of the residential buildings in any area have a parking space on the ground floor or basement or both.

There is also no way for the people of residential building to rent their vacant parking space when they are not using it.

But there is no way for the people to know if there is any vacant parking space available in any nearby residential buildings.

An app that lets people living in residential buildings rent out their unused parking space and allows others to book that available space.

As this is a concept app it is important to define the business aspects of it and make necessary assumptions.

Source of revenue would be the money that the people will pay for renting the parking space. Amount of revenue generated will be the key metric of the app.

The renter (resident of the flat) gets an incentive equivalent to 10% of this revenue.

But how will a renter rent their parking space?

The app needs to have the details of their parking space and there should be a specific numbering system for all the parking spaces.

Assumption 1: The building owners are registered with PayPark, and we have provided them with login credentials. Each set of credentials corresponds to a specific flat. When residents move in, they will receive their respective login credentials, which they can use to access the app.

Assumption 2: All the building parking spaces have a similar numbering system for each parking space (Eg. D-11, D-12, D-13, etc) and there will be one parking space for each flat.

Before proceeding further, in-order to avoid any confusion let us get the terminology clear:

1. Renter: The flat resident who rents their parking space.

2. Payer: The person who is paying to park their car at the rented parking space.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Upon moving in, each flat resident i.e. renter will receive their login credentials via email, which they can use to access their account for the first time.

When the renter logs in for the first time, they will set a new password to be used for future logins.

Once the renter is logged in, he can proceed to rent the parking space.

The renter first needs to select the date range for renting their parking space. They can scroll to choose the number of days or tap on the end date directly. There are two reasons for adding the scroll interaction:

Reason for doing this: If renters could choose any start and end date for renting the parking space, they might forget to vacate on time, causing a bad experience for the payer who booked the parking space.

After selecting the date, renter can proceed to choose the time and confirm the details before renting the space.

After renter has rented the parking space he can see on home screen when someone books the parking space.

Once a place is up for rent the payer who is looking for a parking space can book the space.

Users can use the app without logging in, because if they login and don’t find any parking space in that area than it would waste their time. And it may prevent them from using the app again.

Now they can look for multiple parking spaces available in their area.

In the map they can see per hour charge and distance, as they are deciding factor to choose a parking space.

On tapping that location payer can see the address and time for which it is available.

After the payer has found a parking space and is ready to book it, they will be asked to log in by entering their mobile number.

First time users will also have to add their vehicle details.

Once this is done, user will proceed to select the date and time, it will be similar to how it was for the renter and confirm their details.

Before users proceed with payment, they need to be informed about the terms &amp; conditions and cancellation policy. Initially, these were displayed on the confirmation screen. But as it is a very important information, I decided to show it in a modal just before payment is made.

Part 3: After the parking space is booked

After completing the payment, the user will be redirected to the home screen where they can view all their bookings.

Once payer has booked the parking space the renter can see all the bookings on his renter app.

As I mentioned earlier, the renter can rent the space for max 30 days from the present day, they can increase the renting duration everyday if they want.

Well if someone have already booked a time slot, in that case the renter won’t be able to cancel renting the space till the last time slot is over.

Case 1: What happens if the space that a renter has rented is not vacated at the designated time.

If that is the case the payer can click the picture of the parking space and file a complain, if it is someone else’s car the payer gets a refund in 3-5 days.

After complaining if it is found that the car belongs to someone who booked the slot and parked earlier than scheduled, then that person would be fined and will be contacted by the support team to vacate the parking space. The payer would get their money back.

If the car belongs to another individual, the support team will contact the renter and issue a warning. Multiple occurrences of such issue may lead to their account being banned.

Case 2: What if the payer uses the parking space for more than the booked time?

When the renter returns back to their home and finds that their parking space is still not vacated by the payer, in that case they can file a complain. If the car belongs to the payer, the support team will reach out to them and will be fined.

The user flow of filing the complain will be similar to the renter.

The payer can choose to pay when they are fined or they can choose to pay later. If the total fine amount exceeds ₹500, they will have to pay first before they can use the app.

The screens I showed above are important ones. Here are the rest of them.

So that was all about PayPark. Hope you found it interesting. If you have any feedback about the case study I would love to know about it.

Figma file:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.figma.com/design/lahtlRx8SYcbN1ZSpHUIgw/PayPark-Project?node-id=44-2&amp;t=8rElzFmPeHxai0JP-1">https://www.figma.com/design/lahtlRx8SYcbN1ZSpHUIgw/PayPark-Project?node-id=44-2&amp;t=8rElzFmPeHxai0JP-1</a>

PayPark - Rent and Find parking Space in Metro Cities

Website design <a href="https://www.figma.com/design/QRstDVdzcd1TuGeLqxfmYI/Web-design-work?node-id=0-1&amp;t=TOmP9UcJ8dDE8LJL-1">https://www.figma.com/design/QRstDVdzcd1TuGeLqxfmYI/Web-design-work?node-id=0-1&amp;t=TOmP9UcJ8dDE8LJL-1</a>

Dashboard design <a href="https://www.figma.com/design/JZrUZSdilbDQXR33wDtYML/Dashboard-design?node-id=0-1&amp;t=BhfdJOVyHFDYSlZ8-1">https://www.figma.com/design/JZrUZSdilbDQXR33wDtYML/Dashboard-design?node-id=0-1&amp;t=BhfdJOVyHFDYSlZ8-1</a>

Webflow design <a href="https://tropicanasocial.webflow.io/">https://tropicanasocial.webflow.io/</a> <a href="https://autocar-2c5fa7.webflow.io/">https://autocar-2c5fa7.webflow.io/</a> <a href="https://heallth-my-way.webflow.io/">https://heallth-my-way.webflow.io/</a> <a href="https://www.aarogram.com/">https://www.aarogram.com/</a>

Product Designer