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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. 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
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.
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While the wizard design presents a very learnable and efficient interface for the first-time users, it does however 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 on of how to build resumes.
Safety
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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
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 . Although (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.
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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 creates 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 present 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.