Profession is a well-known job portal in Hungary that had over 15,000 job listings available at the beginning of 2021. They are always working to improve their products and services, including their Intelligent Product Recommendation System and its website.
The system helps recruiters find the best fit from a range of products or services, using pre-defined filters and an algorithm.

They experienced a continuous drop in conversion rate that prompted them to team up with the agency I worked for at that time in search of a solution.

Our team of four, consisting of marketing and developer professionals, sat down with stakeholders to better understand their problem and needs.

As the discussion went on, we realized that we didn't have sufficient data to build a hypothesis about why their conversion rate had changed. However, they didn't allow us to do user research due to budget constraints and a close deadline. So, we collected as much data as we could from the stakeholder interview, available site analytics, and usability heuristics.

However, we did not feel confident enough to define the real problem due to the limited data we had.

So, as a workaround, I made a UX/UI audit, gathered all the data I could and organized a brainstorming session, where we came up with a few potential solutions and settled on our main concept.

Our understanding of the current implementation and the problem was that the users couldn't grasp what the system was doing, how it was helpful for them and even why they should use it.

Our approach to solving their conversion rate issue was to organize the website’s content and design around guiding users through the system by demonstrating how they can use and benefit from it.

Throughout the project, we raised our concerns a few times about my team's lack of confidence in whether our concept would solve their pain point; they still decided to give it a try. Fortunately, we were able to use A/B testing to find out how the new design fairs compared to the old one.

They were surprisingly remarkable. Even though, at first, they built the site with their older design system components, which were different from those we used in our design, the new design resulted in a conversion rate increase of almost 50% within the first two months.

It was my first time leading a complex project that utilized user experience and design thinking techniques and principles to solve a problem. Although I did have initial worries about how it would turn out, the outcomes of the project gave me a significant boost in confidence. I learned that it’s not always necessary to be 100% certain about everything during our work.

Over the years, I think I have come to understand the meaning of this lesson. To improve, we need to experiment to learn by failing or succeeding.