Crafting Personalised Experiences for Niche Recruitment
Counted urgently needed a website overhaul to better promote their personalised approach to matching accounting talent with opportunities. As lead designer across UX, UI and branding, I aimed to create digital touchpoints reflecting Counted's niche focus and facilitation of connections. My role focused on aligning visual design with user needs revealed through research. This ensured the new mobile-friendly site amplified Counted's passion for nurturing talent by making relevant openings easy to discover and apply to.
UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM
Digging into the User Perspective
Enhancing scannability while promoting customization emerged as the central challenge. Stakeholder interviews also highlighted Counted's USP - a highly relational, caring approach leveraging local relationships and passion for personalized recruitment in the Birmingham/Worcestershire accounting domain. To improve navigation, I created a new site map optimizing the information architecture. This crucial step simplified the user journey, making it easier to find relevant opportunities and explore Counted's offerings. The restructured content hierarchy aligned with business goals and user needs, improving usability and reinforcing Counted's specialized, user-centric brand identity.
Strategy
Reflecting Relationships in the Design
I developed representative personas containing behaviours and motivations from research findings. Creating fictional users like Sam the Senior Accountant and Alexa the Graduate ensured alignment to goals: 1. Easily find relevant opportunities 2. Quickly understand role details 3. Apply with minimal effort These two personas contained conflicting needs - Sam required concise content for scannability, while Alexa wanted expansive detail. My solution was crafting modular UI components that could be expanded or collapsed. Container sizes and page layouts also dynamically respond based on user testing data of preferred content length.
CREATIVE DIRECTION
Pioneering a New Brand Identity
A pivotal milestone was formulating an entirely new creative direction for Counted Recruitment to evolve their brand identity. I explored a vast range of options for typography, color palettes, graphical elements, photography styles, and more to convey Counted’s niche expertise with a sleek, contemporary aesthetic. Presenting stakeholders various artistic directions led to the breakthrough idea of integrating Counted’s highly relational methodology into the logo itself through numerical glyphs symbolizing personalized connections. These dynamic digits within the mark aesthetically communicate Counted’s focus on nurturing talent by making meaningful matches. This innovative branding concept aligned seamlessly to the website experience I designed, reinforcing messages of Counted’s passion for community and individualized service. The pioneering identity delivered significant advancements in capability to spotlight Counted’s specialty across digital touchpoints.
EXECUTION
Crafting Intuitive, On-Brand Experiences
The revamped site and brand identity feature: - Homepage with compelling stats and modular job listings - Scannable job details page with expandable sections - Vibrant colors, and bold typography reflecting methodology Research participants praised the simplified navigation and digestible scans facilitating discovery. The choice-based UI fulfils multiple expectations thanks to flexibility. Counted's passion now shines through thanks to aligned digital experiences.
