Scenario
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 (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 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. After entering these details, Isamu decides to build his first resume. 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
Having decided to use IvyPlusResumes, Isamu points his browser to the website, and decides to sign up. Very simply, the signup interface asks him to provide his email and a password.
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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 creating an electronic form of it (such as PDF).
Analysis
Learnability
The wizard design is very learnable, since it goes through every step of resume construction in a detailed fashion. 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 handholding and direction for the user, which is great for users with little on no background on resume building process.
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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. However, the wizard interface is going to prevent this from happening by disallowing users to skip steps without providing enough information for each step.
Design
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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.
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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.
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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
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 sees some text about how IvyPlusResumes will get him ready for networking. He sees a place to login, and a place to sign up for an account, so he decides to sign up.
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