Hitmarker
I evaluated, conducted research for, and re-designed a job board for video game and esports jobs called Hitmarker to better suit the needs of job seekers in the video game industry.
Hitmarker is a job board designed to house video game and esports jobs, as well as provide resources for starting or advancing a person’s career in the industry. The video games industry is currently going through a difficult time due to layoffs, so this can be a very valuable tool for job seekers affected by layoffs.
Layoffs
ROLE
UX Researcher & Designer
METHODS
Competitive Audit & Analysis, Heuristic Analysis, Directed Storytelling, Experience Mapping, Prototyping, Usability Testing
The video games industry is currently going through a difficult time due to layoffs: up to thousands of people are being let go from their jobs at video game companies every month (see statistics to right), which is resulting an incredibly saturated market.
Lack of Clarity
Especially for junior applicants trying to break into the industry, it can be difficult to understand the required skillsets or even what job titles they could be pursuing beyond “art” or “coding” roles (list of roles in gaming pictured to the right). There are hundreds of potential roles for people to apply for and each has very different job requirements, so in a vacuum applying for these roles can seem very daunting. People are in desperate need of resources to land their dream jobs in the gaming industry.
Right: stats of layoffs in the gaming industry (sourced from Wikipedia), and a summary of roles in the industry created by Hitmarker.
Job Hunting Pain Points in Gaming
Context: Problems in the Video Games Industry
The primary method of research was directed storytelling sessions with job seekers and professionals in the games industry, focusing mainly on their backgrounds and experience within the video game industry.
The participant pool included a mixture of established members of the industry, people with experience in related fields who want to break into the development side, people that are interested in a career in games but have little to no work experience in in the field.
This helped provide a variety of responses and highlighted some of the main barriers for getting a job in the industry, as well as identify which demographics were struggling the most in this job climate.
Research
Job Hunting Communities on LinkedIn & Discord
One of the major differences in the process of applying for video game jobs now and when Hitmarker started was the development of the communities and resources available on LinkedIn and Discord servers. The community has been working hard to compile these career and networking spreadsheets and spaces to help connect people with the information they need to find jobs. These communities and resources were a large talking point during my research sessions, and one of the pain points was that many junior level people that received mentorship were not aware of the resources until they were told about them.
Primary User Groups
With the information and perspective from my research participants, the primary user groups almost formed by themselves naturally. The main focus of the interview sessions was on the struggle for junior level applicants due to increased competition with more senior level people that had been affected by layoffs and the overall decrease in entry level postings (as well as entry level jobs requiring senior level experience).
Junior Level Applicants
Starting a career in games
Trying to find career resources or mentors
May have work experience in related fields
Often competing with senior level applicants for entry level roles
During my research sessions, I also asked the participants to perform a quick user evaluation of the current Hitmarker website and to speak on what they felt worked well or didn’t work well. Their thoughts can be summarized into to following points:
Hitmarker Website Evaluation
In order to translate the findings of my research and interviews, I started out by sketching out the main screens that I wanted to focus on in my redesign concept. The main pages that I focused on were the landing page, redesigning the job post page to include the features I came up with from my competitive analysis, and the profile page as I determined that the best way to speed up applications and directly apply is by giving users the ability to store their resume and work experiences on Hitmarker.
As someone who has experience in not only extensive job hunts, layoffs, and interest in a games career: I had a foundation for understanding what I personally would helpful in a job board. From the start, I was already aware of other job boards such as Otta, Work with Indies, LinkedIn, and Indeed that I would be examining and taking inspiration from.
My main concerns and challenges for this project were to understand gain a better understanding of what was unique about the
Competitive Analysis
Directed Storytelling
Experience Mapping
Based on my research, I created tried to formulate how I envisioned a user going through the job application and tracking process on Hitmarker. The main points in the process I wanted to focus on could be boiled down to locating jobs, looking for career advice, and job applications.
One of the challenges in the project was identifying the “happy path” to a user’s experience while using a job board (if there is such a thing while job hunting). I envisioned users gaining context from the landing page, progressing to the job feed to locate postings, going into more depth on the postings that they were interested in, and then back to the job feed after deciding to apply or not apply, which is a fairly standard flow. The more unique aspects would come from filling out their profile and supplementing their knowledge on the news and resources pages, which could be a second flow.
Right: Information Architecture diagram highlighting the “happy path”.
Lo-Fidelity Sketching
Main Goals & Solutions
Landing Page
“Extreme Burnout” from job hunting
Long and repetitive application process
Market saturated with overqualified applicants due to layoffs, especially at entry level
Resources are present and helpful, but many people are not aware of them
“Possibly the worst time for juniors trying to get into the industry”
Senior Level Applicants
Has experience in the video game industry, working on published titles
Most likely has been affected by layoffs across the industry
Currently looking for more work on a contract or full time employment basis
Lack of landing/home page made it unclear what the purpose of the website is
Filters on the website are not very accurate
UX Designer searching for roles on the website, but Hitmarker was returning UI Engineering roles instead
Certain aspects of navigation around the website broke heuristics and logic for people
Clicking on “More Jobs” at the bottom of a posting did not retain the filters, which was annoying to some people
Provide immediate context on the website and brand identity
Simplify and speed up application process
Help bring awareness and point people to job hunting resources and people and communities to follow
Increase connection between applicants and job posters
Although most of my design choices felt fairly straight forward, there were two major challenges that I faced in the design and concepting process.
I initially wanted to capitalize more on the growing communities and resources that were available on LinkedIn and Discord, especially since they were so prominent in my research and discussions. However, based on secondary conversations with people in the industry, they were already experiencing fatigue just from engaging on their existing platforms and two people specifically said they don’t want to add any more platforms to keep track of or engage with.
Because of this feedback, I decided that rather than repeating what already exists, and did not get people excited, it was better to focus on improving the overall functionality of the website based on the comments and feedback I recorded during the evaluations.
Secondly, I struggled with conceptualizing how to expedite the application process. Additionally, during the evaluations users felt a disconnect between the applicant and job posters. Since the networking aspect of the process was a central theme for successful applicants in the industry, I felt that there should be also be more meaningful information being shared through the applications. These two thoughts culminated in the decision to allow users to build in-depth profiles on Hitmarker. Currently there is essentially no profile information on the Hitmarker website, and adding this feature would both allow for faster applications by storing their experience and work natively on the site, but sharing user profiles as a part of the application process would also assist with the networking part of the experience.
News & Resources
Conclusions
Ending Thoughts
Job Feed
In order to translate the findings of my research and interviews, I started out by sketching out the main screens that I wanted to focus on in my redesign concept. The main pages that I focused on were the landing page, redesigning the job post page based on the features I came up with from my competitive analysis, and the profile page as I determined that the best way to speed up applications and directly apply is by giving users the ability to store their resume and work experiences on Hitmarker.
Prototyping
Design Goals
Updated Job Posting
Profile
Interactive Prototype
“I don’t want to sign up for more stuff, I’m very boomer about the way I get my info.”
- A UX Designer trying to break into the industry
“[Hitmarker] doesn’t allow me to see other users, it doesn’t feel very user centered.”
- Anonymous Interviewee from Larian Studios
Revisiting the Pain Points
“Extreme Burnout” from job hunting
Long and repetitive application process
Market saturated with overqualified applicants due to layoffs, especially at entry level
Resources are present and helpful, but many people are not aware of them
“Possibly the worst time for juniors trying to get into the industry”
Design Challenges
Part of the process in this project was a short presentation intended to showcase the design concept and work in progress in a forum that included other UX professionals. The slide deck and recording of my presentation can be seen below.
Presentation
Next Steps
Developing a mobile version for the changes implemented
Evaluating and improving the experience for job posters & recruiters
Based on conversations and interviews, this is an aspect that people were interested in fleshing out more
Refining the profile and onsite resume
Further simplify the job application process
Including a field to send a message to the hiring manager that automatically gets sent with application to start that networking process
Landing Page
One of the first things that people mentioned during the website evaluations of Hitmarker was that if they had no prior knowledge of what the website was, they would understand that it is a job board, but nothing about it being catered to video game and esports jobs.
To help with with contextualizing what service Hitmarker offers, I created a landing page which immediately tells users that it is to help them find a job in gaming, as well as providing a sneak peek of what kinds of jobs are available.
Improved Job Posting
Although the current layout for job postings on Hitmarker is functional, in my own initial evaluation of the website, I felt that all the information blended together due to a lack of visual hierarchy. From personal experience I really found Otta’s layout to be very effective and the way information about the job and company is laid out helped increase applicants’ understanding.
Based on the usability tests I conducted, 3 out of 3 users found this format to be superior to the original.
The current build of Hitmarker is functional, but does not adequately meet the needs of users in this difficult time in the video games industry. The landscape of the industry is constantly changing due to significant layoffs at major studios and companies, and as a result applicants are required to stay up to date and apply as quickly and establish.
By providing increased visibility to career resources and shortening the application process, 4 out of 4 users commented during usability testing that they felt they better understood the flow and identity of the Hitmarker website, and that there were many features that they would like to see on other job boards as well (in particular the Insights on responses and articles sections).
Profile & Faster Applications
As mentioned earlier, one of the main goals of this project was to simplify and reduce the headache of applying for jobs through Hitmarker. One of the major critiques of the website was the inability to apply directly through Hitmarker, forcing extra clicks and entering information repeatedly. The solution to this was pretty simple: allow users to store a resume and list of experiences on Hitmarker which would allow them to apply quickly and directly.
I decided that the best way to implement this would be by fleshing out the profile page to store the relevant experiences, skills, and contact information to automatically populate the applications.
2 out of 3 users specifically commented that they felt this was a good idea.
Application Tracking
Related to the updated application process, another difficulty in job hunting is the act of keeping track of applications, and their progress or status. After applying on Hitmarker, you would be prompted to confirm whether or not you applied for the role and upon confirmation, the application would be moved to a page which stores all of your applications in various stages of updates.
Users can move application between the different stages once updates are received, and can be removed from the queue if they are no longer in the running for a role.
Career Resources
Although the users in my research sessions did not want to engage with their communities on Hitmarker, I still felt that these resources are incredibly important tools that should be available. So rather than bringing the discussions to Hitmarker, I wanted to focus on enabling job applicants to have easy access to the resources and contact information for top voices in the gaming industry, rather than just general career advice like what Hitmarker currently has on its Career Advice page.