Hackers and Painters
End-To-End UX Design
A modern recruiting platform meant to simplify sourcing, Hackers & Painters pools together all of the public projects and info of designers, developers, and data scientists, to create comprehensive profiles for the most entrepreneurial candidates. Here’s how I independently conducted end-to-end design to envision, wireframe, and prototype this product for development.
A gif that shows final screens from the project layered onto each other
Role
Founding Designer
Tools
Figma,
Zeplin
Timeline
August 2020 - September 2021
Skills
User Research,
Competitor Analysis,
Wireframing,
Prototyping
00
Background

How might we increase entrepreneurial talent across companies by providing recruiters more holistic candidate profiles that emphasizes designers' and developers' project experience, using public work and information scraped from the web?

This was the question that motivated the creation of Hackers and Painters. During the Covid-19 summer of 2020, I was approached by the Founder of H&P in search of a designer. What followed was a year long collaboration between our small team which consisted of 4 people--me, a developer, and 2 founders.

01
Research
Logos of market competitors and screenshots of their software
Various applicant tracking system and sourcing market competitors.

Market competitors

I took a look at the platforms of other competitors, whether it was signing up for free trials, searching through screenshots online, reading posts on the r/recruiting subreddit, or interviewing recruiters about their choice tool.

Research conclusions

1.
Recruiters value convenience of information
as they want to be able to see the most basic candidate information immediately, such as name, time in current position, educational institution, years of experience, and current job title.
2.
Recruiters rely on scoring systems
that assess and rank candidates to expedite the search process.
3.
Certain information carries a lot of weight.
While it may be controversial, recruiters I spoke to emphasized being able to access candidate's education degree.
4.
Recruiters enjoy the flexibility of spreadsheets
to keep track of candidate information and their stage in the hiring pipeline.
5.
Recruiters must employ many search parameters
to narrow down their vast candidate pools.
6.
Recruiters are increasingly trying to eliminate sourcing bias
to increase diversity at their organizations.
User research notes
Notes from user research interviews.

User research

I also participated in customer research calls with recruiters at Uber, Google, & other Fortune 500 companies to further understand sourcing pain points.

02
Focus Areas

Based on my research, I identified 3 main features for the MVP that would fulfill the needs of the recruiters. The last focus of the project would be creating landing pages to promote H&P.

1.
Powerful Search.
Implement a search tool that combines a wide array of parameters to narrow down the candidate pool. Candidate previews with useful at-a-glance information to enable faster sourcing.
2.
Candidate Profile.
All-in-one candidate profiles organize a sea of information and are broken into the helpful sections: About, Snapshots, Resume, & more.
3.
Candidate Pipeline.
An integrated candidate pipeline to track candidate progress & status in hiring and interview stages.
4.
Landing Pages.
Strong landing pages that promote the product & features and facilitate sign-up with intuitive forms.
03
Early Wireframing
Wireframe sketches of the Home and Consulting Services pages
04
Final Designs
Wireframe sketches of the Home and Consulting Services pages
Wireframe sketches of the Home and Consulting Services pages
Wireframe sketches of the Home and Consulting Services pages
Wireframe sketches of the Home and Consulting Services pages
05
Takeaways & Outcomes

Once I had completed the design of the MVP, my designs started to go into development. Unfortunately the tool never made it to market. Nevertheless, this was an enormous learning experience, especially because I was working independently and took ownership over all design decisions.

This project marked a lot of firsts for me: conducting market research, using Figma, prototyping, collaborating closely with a developer, and being in a scrappy startup environment. It required me to be okay with ambiguity and to take initiative, such as watching endless Figma tutorials. In retrospect, things I would’ve changed about this project were to conduct user research without giving interviewees any idea of the sort of product concept we already had in mind. If we had done more of this, I think we could have generated more genuine insights. I also would’ve conducted more user testing with my designs and presented task scenarios to see how users navigate through the prototype. Lastly, I would’ve utilized a consistent grid and column layout to make my designs even cleaner–something I’ve greatly improved on since then.