Notes
Project: The notes feature provides the ability for a recruiter or hiring manager to leave internal messages. Some uses include: providing a rejection reason, providing supplementary info to a resume, or leaving a comment for a future interviewer.
My Role: User Experience and Design.
Problem
The notes feature was in dire need of some UX love, being infrequently utilized by recruiters and often cited as “hard to find” and difficult to use.
User Experience Goals
Increase findability of the notes feature
Reduce the overall effort of adding notes
Technical Requirements
View all notes about a candidate in relation to the job (default), or the candidate in general
Easily identify who left the note and when it was left
Ability to edit & delete
Evaluation of the Existing Feature
The existing Notes feature inside a candidate’s profile was hidden inside a collapsed accordion that required a minimum of three clicks to access which made it difficult to quickly scan feedback. Typically, I don’t broadly endorse “counting clicks” as I don’t believe it’s a good metric for measuring experience, however in this case the additional clicks were standing directly in the way of the usability of the feature. Notes were also truncated so that a user would need to click into them to see the full note.
The existing Notes feature in action.
Technical Research
I asked my Product Manager to query a couple of pieces of data across all the notes created by our users:
The median length of a note in characters
The median number of notes left per candidate
I wanted the median to help weed out the few users who may have been using the feature for something other than leaving notes (such as pasting in conversation threads or entire emails). We had a single case of over 70k notes left on a candidate profile, which was definitely an outlier. The query came back that notes were around 389 characters, and each candidate had 2.01 notes left on their profile.
With this information, it seemed reasonable to keep all notes exposed in their entirety on the candidates’ notes tab, so a recruiter could easily scan and read them without having to leave the page or expand individual notes. We do expect that the increased functionality of the feature will encourage higher usage, and we may need to revisit exposing all notes if the feature begins to be more heavily used.
Below are a few screens:
Here is a link to the Figma prototype: Notes Prototype
This is the updated feature in production
Improvements
The feature was improved in a few key areas:
All notes were now able to be added and edited in-line, eliminating the pop-up window.
Subject lines were auto-generated with the name of the logged-in user and a timestamp to reduce notes with blank subjects (auto-generated subject lines are also editable upon creation).
A filter was added to show notes that were system-generated, or left on other jobs, related to the same candidate
What worked
Overall the reception of the Notes feature was received as an overall improvement from the existing feature. Recruiters and Hiring Managers commented that they were happy to be able to see the all notes on a candidate’s profile at a glance and adding new notes was simple and intuitive.
What didn’t work
The main complaint that came up during usability testing was the fact that Notes was still relegated to its own tab, where recruiters would like the ability to see them alongside other information (such as taking notes while reviewing a resume).
What’s next
In doing research on the IA of candidate profiles, one of the areas the came up multiple times was the desire to be able to leave a note from anywhere. Another suggestion that came up was the ability to add tags to notes to help sort/organize. These suggestions were brought to Product’s attention and planned for a future enhancement.
Results
So as not to disrupt the workflow for users who are used to using the legacy version of iCIMS, new/redesigned features need to be enabled before being used. Adoption of these features was one of the goals we were measuring to gauge success.