Graphic Design Jobs UK

Jobs board website

Graphic Design Jobs UK is a jobs board website created for graduates and entry level designers to find work.

This was a freelance job completed in September 2022.

Challenge

Graduates and early career designers need a comprehensive and trustworthy location to find and apply to job listings for permanent and freelance roles in the UK, and to get guides and advice to help them with their careers. We will know this to be true when we see users visiting and engaging with the site, applying to listings, and reading the guidance content available.

Solution

Implementing a user centric design methodology to create a jobs board where employers can pay to posting design job listings, and employees can quickly and easily find and apply to these listings.

Outcome

Graphic Design Jobs UK is a fully responsive web app where anyone looking to hire designers can pay a fee to list their vacancies. Designers can search, browse and apply for jobs directly from the site, and also access content to help them in their career progression such as guides, insights and advice from people within the industry.

My Role

UX design
UX research
Visual design
UI design

Tools

Miro
Figma
Illustrator
Pen & paper

Project Summary

Design Process

1

Discover

2

Define

3

Ideate

4

Design

Discover

Competitor Analysis

The first step was to have a look at what competitor jobsboard websites were offering, and their visual design and written tone of voice. From this we decided on a list of features for GDJUK.

Website features

Browse/Search
Apply
Newsletter signup
Job update alerts
Online payments
Submit job listing (with created account)
Edit job listing
Set listing as live or hidden

Discover

Define

Persona creation

From the client's provided market research and interviews, I created a persona of the early career job hunter, so we could better understand potential users' goals, needs, experiences, and behaviours. This persona would help guide my ideas and sketches throughout the project.

Card sort

The purpose of this card sort exercise was to make sure the categories and navigation followed a familiar pattern so that users could access all they need to. From this I could see that participants defined the Job Listings, Job Submit, Newsletter and Charity Support to be the main content for the site. For supporting content the Blog, Podcast, and Interviews were consistent selections. The third category contained all personalised content that can only be accessed by logging in and cards such as Profile, Settings, Wallet and Orders were selected.

Sitemap

Using the results from the card sort, the below sitemap was developed:

Ideate

Sketches & Wireframes

At this stage I created a series of sketches and wireframes. These helped to refine how the features would come together on screen and to accelerate decision-making through visualisation without losing time, the mid fidelity wireframes were then created in Figma.

I came back to the sketches & wireframes throughout the entire design process to make sure that I didn’t lose sight of our primary goals and ideas.

Ideate

Responsive wireframes - Home

Design

Brand Identity

This website is to be a sister brand to that already established on Nikky Lyle Creative, so I selected a few key elements from that identity such as the pink/green colours, the gradients, and circles of colour. As the message of the new brand is that of growth and inclusivity, I created a collection of illustrated young people who will represent the diversity of opportunity that GDJUK provides.

Used throughout all branded visual identity, the people add a youthful energy, sense of fun, and help to illustrate the excitement of getting started in your creative career.