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Ben, a recruiter for a Software company, is looking for Software Developers at MIT. Thus, he goes to the MITJobs homepage (1). |
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Since it is the first time that he is accessing MITJobs website, he does not have a MIT certificate. He signs up using the form shown on the right. After singing up Ben enters a new webpage (2a). He wants to create a new post and thus he presses the button “Create Post”, which is at the top-right of the page. |
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Then a overlaid webpage (3b) appears in front of the old webpage. He fills in all the necessary information about the job opportunity and saves it. |
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Alyssa, an undergraduate student in Computer Science, is looking for a Job in Software Development. She enters in MITJobs homepage and since she has an MIT Certificate, she directly signs in. Then she is forwarded to webpage 2a. |
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At this stage, she browses the job posts, where there is a small description of every job. When she finds some nice job description, she clicks on it. After she clicks, an overlaid page with the description of the job post appears (just like the one in 3b, but without the save button). |
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Alyssa decides to contact Ben to inquire about the posting, and get some more details about the project. At the post (3b) she presses the button “Message”, then she is redirected to page 4c, with the information of the recipient filled. She then writes her message, and sends a new message. |
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She then receive a reply from Ben and the message is overlaid her inbox and looks like page 4b. They set up a meeting. |
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In the meantime, Dragos, an undergraduate at MIT, who has already interviewed with another company, but would like to keep up with the updates from Ben’s job post. He signs into the website with his MIT certificate,browses the job opportunities and then chooses to follow Ben’s job post. |
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After some days, Dragos enters again in the website and then chooses the tab “My Posts” (3a). He sees under “Posts I am following” that there is an update in Ben’s post. He clicks it and then an overlaid page with the post. The post contains the updated details enhanced. |
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Learnability:
The interface is easy to learn since it uses several common affordances. The homepage is very similar to some webpages to social networks that are widely used, like Facebook, Twitter and Gmail. The tabs resemble the organization of a webrowser.
Efficiency:
This design is very efficient, since the user is on average three clicks away from whatever information it needs. First, to sign in or sign up, second to choose the right tab, and then to choose the information within the tab.
The only problem is that the user needs to sign in every time that enters in the website, which makes the website less efficient.
Visibility:
The main objects, browsing, posts ans messages, are very visible, since they are at the top of the page, right after the logo. If the user needs to do some task related to messaging, posting or browsing, there is a clear tab indicating them.
Also, for an employer the button to create a post is always visible at the top-right of the page, making it very simple to the employer to create a post.
There is the problem when reading posts or messages that the message or the post is over the screen and nothing can be done except editing the post or message on the website. But when replying to messages, the old messages is always appended at the end of the reply, so the user knows what is the content of the original message.
Error Prevention:
The buttons have a clear description of what they make (like delete or follow), but there is no way of undoing any action.
Design 2
In this design, Ben comes to the website (Figure 1) and clicks on the “Sign Up” button.
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