OnBoard
Collaborated with a team of 6 designers to create an external website using the OnBoard enterprise design system, improving the process for aspiring board applicants to easily find and apply for positions.
Duration
Jan 2023 - May 2023
Tools
Figma, Miro, & Zoom
Skills
Sketching, Prototyping, Comparative Analysis, Utilizing a Design System, Usability Testing, User Interviews
Project Overview
​​​Challenge- The current features on OnBoard are focused on identifying and pinpointing gaps on a specific board so it can direct them in looking for new potential members. OnBoard is trying to step beyond board management and integrate the process of hiring new board members within the company as well. This is in an attempt to allow boards to not only identify gaps through OnBoard, but also allow them to fill those gaps. This project enabled OnBoard to explore designs within this space.
​
Solution- To design an external site where users can apply for any open board positions.
​
Role- Product Designer
​
User Group
The primary user group would be interested in applying to specific kinds of board positions
Final Deliverable
We handed off a functional prototype tested and ready for development
What Are Potential Board Members Looking For and How do They Look For Opportunities?
Interviews
We conducted 5 interviews with people who have had experiences on different kinds of boards. 3 of them had experience on nonprofit boards, both looking for and hiring for, 1 of them was an expert on boards from OnBoard, and 1 had significant experience hiring and looking for corporate boards. Our protocol was based on understanding how they look for positions currently, how they hire for board openings, and what they look for in positions. We found patterns in our findings using an affinity diagram.
Affinity Diagram from Interviews
Key Insights
-
What board seekers prioritize when looking for potential opportunities
-
Board seekers want to be passionate about the board that they are joining
-
Board seekers are selective about the commitment involved
-
Board seekers are interested in a specific board type
-
-
What boards are looking for from potential applicants
-
Boards have specific diversity requirements
-
Applicants need to have a specific set of skills and past experiences
-
Boards look for potential new members through the network of their current members
-
-
The process of recruiting for and joining boards strongly involves networking
-
Applicants rarely use an application portal because they are not aware of it or they just make use of connections
After talking to our users and finding out what they prioritize from a hiring end and applicant end, we constructed a persona built based on our research findings.
Who Will Use This to Find Opportunities?
Persona
Using the interview insights, we created a persona for a board seeker. The persona is based on a board seeker who has another job, but is looking to gain experience of being on boards, whether this be non profit boards, government boards, or low level corporate boards. We chose to target this user group because, through our secondary research, we found that people seeking higher-level corporate board positions are usually required to invest, have a significant stake in a company, or buy in to sit on that board and do not use board application platforms to look for positions, but are part of a talent network that boards choose to recruit from. This is also a limitation of our concept.
We would use our persona character 'Matt' to tell the narrative of our designs. He is our target user and would be a great lense to walkthrough our prototype. After this activity we moved into an ideation activity to let the ideas start flowing.
What Would the Application Look Like?
Sketching
After some of our initial research, our team ideated together and completed a sketching workshop. Sketching is the most useful tool in a designer's arsenal. With this workshop, we all analyzed each other's sketches leaving green and red flags indicating features we liked or features not tangible in our scope. These sketches led us to a more complete initial prototype however we still needed to find more gaps through research to design around.
.jpg)
Team sketches
Key Findings
-
Search bar for optimized searching is very important
-
Board industry and role name are very important for seeking desired positions
-
showcasing pay and compensation is not as important for a user​
-
-
Is being able to see current board members inside the board a good idea? would that influence applications or decrease them?
-
Should we showcase the open positions in a grid or list view?
After sketching, lots of design questions arose. This sparked our team to complete a competitive analysis of what current competitors are doing and influencing applicants to apply through their designs.
What Is Currently on the Market?
Competitive Analysis
We looked at the applicant end of three other board application platforms and one general job application platform to understand what they do well and where they fall short. We looked into LinkedIn as well to better understand what sets board application platforms apart from regular job application platforms.
Key Insights
-
All platforms had a strong onboarding process to make sure the profile is fully populated
-
The board platforms only allowed users to see boards that they were qualified for which is why it is important to have the onboarding process to fully populate the profile
-
LinkedIn and other job application platforms allow for anyone to apply for any position
-
Boards do not want to be spammed my applications so preventing unqualified applicants from applying is important
-
-
Two of the platforms have regulated talent networks that a user needs to be approved to get on
-
There is no clear way to sign up for these networks
-
Applicants cannot directly apply for board positions and boards have to reach out to them
-
This caters more towards corporate based positions that require highly qualified candidates
-
After our competitive analysis, we learned that we need to design an onboarding process that will populate the users profile and interest so that the external tool can be personalized and user-friendly to the user. We decided to design a referral system, the application process, and an onboarding process to hand off to the OnBoard team.
Final Designs
Onboarding Process
The onboarding process was influenced from our competitive analysis. It is imperative to have a concise and engaging onboarding process to increase the personalization aspect to our design and to increase user engagement when Matt is applying to boards. We derived elements from existing onboarding processes within LinkedIn and BoardStrong while tying in elements from OnBoard to create the complete design.
In our interviews, we found that boards are trying to become more diverse. This adds the importance to demographic questions within the profile so board members can have an informed vote when acquiring a new member. This process is simple making sure to include elements like the progression of the tasks so there is no wondering or disengagement from Matt. This process is imperative to having a proper personalized profile and board searching experience.
Application Process
​If Matt is looking for board positions and is interested in the tech sector and is hoping to give back to the community in some way, he can use the dashboard to look for positions. The dashboard is where he can filter and search for open board positions. The filters are designed through what we found to be a priority from our 5 user interviews. Below is the process Matt would go through when searching and filtering through boards to apply.
Applying for positions can be a tedious process, primarily due to repetitive regurgitation of information. The autofill of applications and having the ability to edit them and cater them to specific applications saves the time it would conventionally take to type everything form scratch but preserves the ability to specify applications to specific positions.
What Hierarchy Should The Filters Follow?
Usability Testing
We conducted usability testing with 5 people in our user group to understand if they were able to assess and use the filters to find a specific position and apply to it. We conducted the assessment by observing the users and asking them to practice think aloud.
Change in Order of Filters: Putting Industry and Position First
Key Insights
-
Participants were able to easily find and use the right filters for the prompts and the filters were understandable
-
Participants tried to use the search, which was not functional so it wasn’t tested, but this validated the addition of the search bar
-
In observation, all participants tried to narrow down on industry or position first and then other things. Two of the participants even explicitly stated why those things weren’t first. This design change lead to a 40% increase in task efficiency
This prompted a brief design change in the order of the filters. We moved the position and industry filters first as they were prioritized by participants more.
Referral Process
In our interviews, we learned that a lot of the board members only hire through referrals. This meant that we had to incorporate a referral feature since that is the most common way board positions are filled. This is a view from a board member's perspective and how they would refer someone they know.
Once a board member sends a referral, it will send a custom 1-time application link to the respected email where the referee can apply for the open board position. Here is a look at what that process would look like from a referee's perspective.
What Problems Does This Address?
-
Boards with a member who already have people in mind for positions are not likely to post positions. The referral system can encourage them to post positions because they can refer the people they have in mind to compare them easily and even give people who are not involved in their circles a chance if they are more qualified.
-
If Matt knows someone at a company, he can use his network to increase his chances of getting a position.
-
While this is not helpful for those who have no connections and does not address the issues of hiring outside the “inner circle”, OnBoard’s primary customer is boards and even though we are designing for an applicant end platform, the system overall does need to cater to boards. The referral system allows the boards to preserve how they naturally hire new board members.
Impact Statement
My Takeaways
During this project cycle, our team could have been more efficient with keeping the user-centric continuity throughout the product. What we failed to do as a team was test our paper prototypes (sketches). Our Project Owner made this appearent to us and he was right. This helped me learn the effectiveness of paper prototyping. It’s a cost-efficient and time-saving method I wish I had used before starting mid-fidelity mockups. If I were to do this project again, I would utilize more paper prototyping to test early and often.​
This was my first in-depth functional prototype, and a great opportunity to work with the OnBoard Design team. Here are my personal takeaways from the experience:
​
Design Systems – I enhanced my Figma skills, especially with auto layout and applying the OnBoard Design system for colors and typography.
​
Methodology Refinement – Through this project, I sharpened my process, from market analysis and sketching to interviews and UX script writing.
​
Paper Prototyping –I learned the importance of testing early and often, prioritizing quick, low-fidelity methods to gather initial insights. Instead of diving straight into time-intensive Figma prototypes, I discovered that paper prototyping is a more efficient way to validate concepts and inform the creation of initial mockups.
​
Stakeholder Collaboration – Collaborating with the OnBoard team provided valuable insights into industry needs and helped me refine my stakeholder communication skills.