Scenario

We based our scenario on several conversations with international students in our dormitories and living groups.  We also spoke with a recruiter at a large multi-national company that recruits for both domestic and international positions and a tech startup recruiter.  We plan to discuss the idea further with recent graduates and the MIT Career Services Office. 

Isamu is an 18 year old who attends Brown University.  He immigrated from Nagoya, Japan to the U.S. for his freshman year of college.  He has quickly learned about the American way of college--late nights studying, dealing with a roommate, and eating two meals a day in the dining hall (as he always sleeps through breakfast).  It’s early spring and Isamu has heard a lot of buzz about needing to find an internship for the summer.  Isamu has some previous wet-lab experience and would love to work in a research and development group at a biomedical firm near Providence, RI.  He notices that everyone has been polishing up their resumes and getting their dress clothes ready for Friday’s career fair.  Another Japanese student points Isamu towards IvyPlusResumes and suggests that he use the site to build his first resume before the career fair.

Isamu decides to build his first resume and pulls up the site in his web browser.  He is prompted to fill out basic biographical information such as his name and email.  He also fills out his current classes at Brown and intended major, a dual-degree in Business and Biological Engineering.  Next, he enters some of his past experiences, ranging from playing baseball in high school to performing biology research at a college in Nagoya.  With help from IvyPlusResumes, he pulls in the most relevant information and creates the design.  After finalizing the content on his new resume, he decides to share it with employers looking to connect with international students.  Some of these companies might even be at the career fair!  Isamu prints out his brand-new, professional resume and changes into a suit.  He is ready to land his dream internship.

Design 1: The Wizard Approach 

Storyboard

1.1 - Having decided to use IvyPlusResumes, Isamu points his browser to the website and signs up. Very simply, the signup interface asks him to provide his email and a password.

1.2 - After Isamu signs up, he will be directed to enter his basic information such as name, contact info, and address in order to be used in the future resume. Nothing out of the ordinary here, just filling the various fields and checking some options from a drop down menu.

1.3 - Now Isamu arrives to the very first step of resume building. He is asked to provide information regarding his college and high school education. Using each add field, Isamu adds Brown University and his high-school.  He can add more information for each item via the "Add More Info" button (which pops up a window with fields to add more data).

1.4 - Afterwards, Isamu is asked to supply different experiences to his resume. He can use the "Add Experience" field to insert an experience or a position to his resume, and then click the "Add More Information" for each experience to add details such as the position, the start/end dates, and the different tasks accomplished in each experience.

1.5 - Next, Isamu repeats the process for his leadership experiences and enters his different leadership experiences.

1.6 - When Isamu arrives to this page, he has finished entering the information for each category (Education, Experience, Leadership, etc.). Here, Isamu can change the order of categories and subcategories in the resume, and removes things that he does not want to show. The different panels have the affordance of dragging (encouraged via a small icon) and are easily removable, giving flexibility in reordering and selection.

1.7 - Having done all of the previous steps in this wizard-like design, Isamu is ready to see the final outcome of his work and explore his finalized resume. He can, of course, go back and change things easily. Once the resume looks complete, Isamu can enable the option of sharing it with employers and generate a PDF version for the career fair.

Analysis

Learnability

The wizard design is very learnable, since it goes through every step of resume construction in a rigid order. The user only needs to enter the specified information at each step and review entered information at later steps. In fact, the process itself provides a great source of information of how the actual resume building process works. Therefore, the wizard design involves a lot of hand-holding and direction for the user, which is great for users with little on no background on resume building process.

Efficiency

While the wizard design presents a very learnable and efficient interface for the first-time users, it does have some efficiency concerns for users who continue to use the product. Returning users might find the wizard process very inefficient for creating another new resume since by the time they have used the website they will have plenty of knowledge of how to build resumes.

Safety

The wizard design interface is very safe, because it is the what-you-see-what-you-get process, and it is very rare that anything out of the ordinary will happen. Every step in the wizard is very detailed, and thus the user is fully aware of what each step does and how each step functions.  However, it might become the case where the user develops a habitual process of skipping through steps to increase efficiency. The wizard interface prevents this from happening by disallowing users to skip steps without providing enough information for each step.

Design 2: The Balanced Approach 

Storyboard

2.1 - The home screen introduces the graphical layout to Isamu and prompts him to either login or create a new account.

2.2 - Isamu decides to create an account and fills in his name, email, and password.

2.3 - Isamu is immediately taken to a page to enter his biographical information and previous experience.  The current icon and number (the briefcase and #1) are dull and the other two are still bright, indicating they are links.  The text boxes include suggested responses and Isamu is notified of sections that could be improved via bubbles on the right.

2.4 - After Isamu finishes filling out his personal info, he clicks on the resume icon to actually build a resume.  The resume preview on the right is pre-populated with relevant info and Isamu drags the appropriate items on and off the preview.

2.5 - Isamu chooses to save his resume and sees a modal with a smaller preview, blocking the rest of the page.

 
2.6 - After naming the resume, Isamu is automatically redirected to the third page where he can manage previously created resumes.  From here, he can print a PDF to bring to the career fair.

Analysis

Learnability

Each component of the design is fairly learnable.  For example, Page 2.3 includes concrete examples for Isamu to emulate and provides concrete feedback on how to improve each section.  Moving through each page of of the design is less learnable because the user needs to grasp the correct order of tasks.  Isamu might jump straight to Page 2.4 without first logging his information on Page 2.3.  This problem can be mitigated by feedback that suggests the correct order, in addition to the numbers and highlighting for each icon.

Efficiency

This design is efficient because the user only needs to maintain a central log of previous professional and education experience, but can then generate multiple resumes from Page 2.4.  On the other hand, this page lacks efficiency because Isamu needs to drag and drop each piece of information.  This feature is consistent with the experience of copying and pasting information from a CV to a resume, but can become tedious.  The design minimizes this problem by pre-populating each resume with typical information.

Safety

By separating the task of describing the user’s experience and building the actual resume, this design minimizes errors that might arise from trying to change the content and style of a resume at the same time.  Also, a severe error would be sharing an incomplete or unpolished resume and this design not only prevents the user from sharing the resume until the final step, but also only allows for passive sharing (i.e. in a searchable directory for employers as opposed to directly sending an email).

Design 3: The Direct Approach

Storyboard

3.1 - Isamu has decided to use IvyPlusResumes to help him get ready for the career fair tomorrow. He opens his computer and goes to the IvyPlusResume's home page. He enters his email and password to sign up.

3.2 - He is taken to a new account page, where he enters his email address and a password, which he will use to log in from now on.

3.3 - When he hits create, he is taken to his home page. He has the ability to view past resumes by clicking on their names (there are currently no resume names as he has not yet made and saved any resumes). There is also a resume viewer on the page (the right part of the page), where he will see a resume when it is clicked on. Lastly, there is a "Create New Resume" button, which he clicks on to create his first resume.

3.4 - He is now taken to a page which resembles a resume, except where there is usually text, there are textboxes with hints.

3.5 - He fills in these textboxes and has a form that now looks like this:

3.6 - After filling in all of the boxes, he clicks the "Preview" button at the bottom and sees a professional resume with his inputted information as static text.

3.7 - He notices the 4 buttons at the bottom and tries each of them. The "Edit" button takes him back to the previous page which he can edit. The save button opens up a dialog box as follows. He can type in a name and save his resumes. He can then view this resume from his home page under the "View Past Resumes" tab.

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3.8 - Next he tries the "Print" button, which allows him to print his resume, by opening up his computer's print dialog box. He prints his resume and is ready to go to the career fair.

3.9 - Lastly, he clicks the fourth button, the "Share" button. The share button allows him to open and share his resume with any email address he wants, by typing the email address he wants to share with in the dialog box. He then logs out from the top left corner, where he can always find links to his home page or logout.  Logging out without first saving opens the "Save" dialog box. 

Analysis

Learnability

If the user has a general knowledge of what a resume is supposed to look like, the interface is very straightforward, but this might make the design less usable for international students. In order to make the interface more learnable for the beginner, every textbox contains a hint as to what information should be filled in and since the final version looks very similar to the version being edited.  Nevertheless, the user may not know how things should be phrased in certain cases. For example, under a specific work experience, should he use phrases or sentences when explaining what he did?  This is a problem with any resume builder for international students, but is particularly problematic with Design 3.

Efficiency

This design is quite efficient. The user can edit details and immediately receives feedback on the final output.  The interface presents an efficiency problem when the user wants to create a new resume. Since there is no central log of information, every time the user creates a new resume, he will have to edit the information directly within the resume format.  Other interfaces may be more usable for logging a CV of all previous experience relevant to an international student.

Safety

The design is error-prone because the resume can be rapidly edited. The interface might provide some feedback to highlight what changed, but this is not particularly helpful when a student first creates a resume or changes a lot of information. The interface also encourages the user to save the resume before logging out or closing the window.  The interface can also automatically save edited fields, which reduces the problem of only hitting the "Save" button after inputting all details.