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Our users are working age job seekers who wish to become more organized. They are fluent in English and Internet-literate (they've heard of LinkedIn, even if they don't use it). They are not blind. They may or may not be social media users. They do a significant portion of their job search online and are used to communicating through email. They will access the website mostly at home through their personal computers. Users have little contact with other users on the website, unless they happen to be connected offline - the website does not provide any substantial opportunities for social interaction.
All of the individuals we talked to or observed seemed to be applying to either all corporations or all academic positions. The potential user with the most varied job interests (social work as well as work at corporations) was a middle-aged woman who had tended to apply to jobs serially when she was younger. Even with managing only one application at a time, she expressed difficulty with finding and keeping up with contacts inside the companies she was applying to prior to actually applying. She thinks that in order to be a successful new applicant in the future, she would have to adapt toward managing several applications simultaneously.
We observed a student applying to graduate schools in sync with her husband, who is also applying to graduate school in a similar field. They are trying to find compatible schools by applying to a very large number of schools each, and are finding it overwhelming to manage their contacts at every school and to prepare letters of inquiry to every professor they might each want to work with. Another student - this one applying to corporate jobs - was finding it necessary to apply to a large number of companies because she wanted to stay in a certain geographical area.
From these discussions, we can draw some conclusions about what our users need. They need a way to organize their contacts for each application and to keep notes on the opportunities available at and specific characteristics of each institution (particularly the grad school applicants, who need to remember the specific research interests of many professors). They also all seemed to use similar documents to apply to many jobs of a certain type: so we need to provide users with the ability to link one document (possibly a personal statement or letter template) to many applications. None of our users seemed to have an incredibly difficult time keeping track of appointments, but one person we talked to complained about having to spread out a job application over several different computer applications. Consequently, we ought to allow users to use our system to manage their appointments if they wish.
To help us think about our users, we have developed some Some personas:
Ann is a 21-year-old senior at MIT, originally from Idaho. Unsure about exactly what she wants to study, she is applying to grad schools in both math and philosophy across the United States. She is also thinking of deferring enrollment in grad school for two years while she works for a nonprofit, like Teach for America.
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