Timeline: March 2024
My Role: UX Design, UI Design
Client: Local Truck Driver Jobs (LTDJ)
Project: Website Redesgin
Redesigning a Niche Job Board Website
About LTDJ
LocalTruckDriverJobs.com is the first local-only truck driver job website. It was originally built to help truck drivers find routes that are closer to home and ultimately improve their work-life balance.
Challenge
Create a new theme for the LTDJ website that has a more modern, attractive look and sticks to the current minimal aesthetic. Redesign the user experience/appearance of pages related to the main user flow and improve the global navigation.
Refined Homepage
Problem
According to website metrics, most users who visited LTDJ first landed on the homepage. However, the homepage was originally designed with the sole purpose of helping the website rank highly in Google search results and have a quick loading speed. This resulted in a homepage with unscannable text injected with keywords and over 50 different links.
This type of design not only negatively impacted the look of the homepage, but also impacted how users learn about LTDJ and how they interact with the rest of the website.
Original website homepage snapshots and annotations (early March 2024).
Solution
I relied on the few data points the client supplied me with, competitive analysis of other job websites, and UX heuristics to inform my design decisions.
Focusing LTDJ on the Primary User Task: Find a Job
Most job search websites (Snag a Job, Indeed, BuiltIn, etc) reserve the area above the fold for helping users find a job related to their location and interests. With this in mind, I placed the value proposition beneath the job feed and made the area above the fold fully focused on encouraging users to search for jobs.
Creating Multiple Ways For Users to Find What They’re Looking For
During our kickoff meeting, the client emphasized the need for users to browse by city or state because the website specializes in local truck routes. The client also mentioned that one of the most popular ways users like to search is by company.
As a result, when I moved the value proposition beneath the job feed, I broke the original paragraph down into 3 scannable sections with CTAs (call to actions) that prompt the user to browse the site in different ways (by state, by company, etc.).
I also consolidated the original 50+ links into four categories that help users search by what’s important: city, state, company, and trailer type.
A Global Navigation that Better Supports Primary Users
LTDJ’s original top navigation hid everything (except for the CTA to “Post a Job”) behind a burger menu in the desktop view. Since LTDJ’s main focus is to help job seekers, their original top navigation did not best support their primary user group.
To better support job seekers, I added a second link to the top navigation called “Job Seekers.” This opens up a dropdown with items that are most relevant to this user type (according to website metrics and the client).
Additional links that were found in the original burger menu, but did not primarily help job seekers, were moved to the footer. Links that were placed into 2 main categories in the original footer were divided into 3 categories to help users find what they’re looking for more easily.
Scannable Job Cards and Descriptions
When tasked with redesigning the job search results page, I focused on creating a more scannable job card and job description to help users browse through their results faster. After discussions with the client, we determined that the most important information for the user to see upfront (aside from location) is pay and required license.
With this information, I broke out license and pay information into tags and put them above the description on the job card. For the full job description, I placed more detailed tags above the description text and made the button copy more direct.
Conclusion
This was a unique design project because most of the constraints were stylistic. The client was very clear about wanting the website to remain as minimal as possible while having a refreshed and modern look. This caused me to really think about the small details and create contrast by using different typography styles and weights, drop shadows, and leaning on white space to guide the new look and feel of the website.
Take a scroll through my desktop prototype: Homepage or Search Results