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[techgiants-world]

HKS Job Portal, JACK, needs to be Updated to Improve User Experience

This memorandum is for the staff of the HKS Office of Career Advancement and is aimed at providing insight on how the office can improve user experience on the OCA’s job portal, JACK by simplifying the number of buttons on the left-hand navigation and adding a series of shortcut on the main page to enable users to easily find pages on the portal.

I am a current student HKS MPA student and a frequent user of the JACK portal. After signing into the website, one thing that I instantly notice is the overwhelming text and information on the homepage. The home page has a gallery or picture slider and different sections such as Upcoming Events, Latest Jobs posted in JACK, Jobs Expiring Soon, What’s New, which contains too many texts. The website did not use images and icons efficiently.

Another major issue I have faced using the portal is the multiple buttons that I need to click to perform simple operations such as applying to jobs or uploading a resume on the platforms on the left-hand navigation section. To apply for a job, it takes a total of three steps.

Image 1: Homepage of JACK with wordy text

Image 2: Left Hand navigation of JACK with multiple buttons

Recommendations:

The address these two issues, the OCA staff can upgrade the design of the portal to utilize more icons on the homepage to reduce the information overload and help customers get to pages faster, and ii) reduce the steps needed to get to the page when using the left-hand navigation.

 Use icons to represent information to reduce unnecessary long paragraphs of text on the homepage. Icon based navigation such as the one show below can be utilized to enable users to easily navigate to different pages on the portal.

Image 3: Icon based navigation

Enable One-click Apply button for students to reduce the steps it takes to apply to jobs. This is similar to the Easy Apply button that LinkedIn has implemented. Students should not be required to go through 3 or 4 steps before they can apply for jobs. The information provided on their profiles could be utilized to enable quick application submission.

Image 4: One-Click Apply Button

The OCA team should implement these two recommendations to improve user experience and satisfaction on JACK. The changes can be implemented in less than 4 weeks without extensive engineering efforts. I am available this week or next week for a quick call if you want to document additional user requirements build a user story for my recommendation.

 Appendix:

Appendix III: Product Tear Down

The Job and Career for Harvard Kennedy (JACK) is an enterprise software created by Simplicity. The software is built on SharePoint 2013 on Premise and does not have any mobile experience because of the limitation of the SharePoint version. The portal is a subsite within KNET and it was last updated in 2016. KNET has 40+ sites and about 15 are active. KNET is two versions behind and it will take 3 months and cost between $400k to $1 million to upgrade.