End-to-end design • Information architecture • Usability testing
Finding your salary on Glassdoor
Streamlining job title and salary search
ROLE
lead Product Designer
PROJECT LENGTH
Jun 2024 – Aug 2024
TEAM
1 Designer
1 UX Researcher
1 Product Manager
2 ML knowledge engineers, 2 BE engineers, 2 FE engineers
MY IMPACT
Partnered with UXR on prototypes for user testing
Delivery of high fidelity designs to engineering
Future vision development
Project overview
Glassdoor helps jobseekers find accurate pay information, so they can make informed career decisions and negotiate higher pay.
I redesigned the Employer Salaries page, to make the process of finding the right job title & pay, more efficient for our users.
Job titles are confusing … they vary greatly depending on employer and role
PROBLEM
On Glassdoor, there are 3.2M+ job titles, which makes finding the right one time-consuming & difficult for job seekers.
Our complicated information architecture & fragmented display of job titles causes users to:
Navigate to wrong job titles, leading to irrelevant pay for their role
Abandon pay research completely due to loss of trust in our data
At it's worst, this results in 42% of users dropping off the page without a single page interaction.
USER CHALLENGES
How can we make job title discoverability faster, easier, and more personalized for users?
Challenge #1: Browsing passively by job function cards is cumbersome
The current UI puts pressure on users to painstakingly and passively sift through thousands of job titles.
Challenge #2: Valuable search experience is neither accessible, nor intuitive
Search is buried under secondary modules on the page and plagued with usability issues (poor dropdown functionality, lack of click affordance, hidden filters).
Challenge #3: Page navigation to job specific pages is confusing
The Salary Overview page's complex information architecture routes users to dead-end subpages, pushing users into separate pages for specific job functions instead of dynamically filtering the existing page and job titles. Many of these subpages are duplicative and exist primarily for SEO purposes.
USABILITY SOLUTIONS
Empower users with the ability to search, then browse
01
Users default to searching
In research sessions, we found that most users (65% of participants) default to 'searching' for their job title, because it increases perceived speed & precision of their search.
02
… but still appreciate being able to passively browse job functions
'Browsing' gives users flexibility, allowing them to rely on recognition vs. active recall of roles that might be at this employer. In research, browsing was helpful for roles like Product Designer, which can have multiple names & fall into different functions (e.g. Product Management or Arts/Design).
Prioritizing searching for job titles,
while still exposing job functions as filters
allows users to fallback to browsing if they need to cast a wider net.
SEARCHING
Speed and precision
We redesigned the search experience & positioned it above-the-fold to enhance discoverability. Search with filters & in-line actions help users find and take action from the job title list.
BROWSING
Control and confidence
We exposed job functions via a filter chip carousel, below search. This prompts users with available job function options, instead of hiding them behind a dropdown.
TECHNICAL CHALLENGES
How can we navigate data quality issues and guide users to the most relevant data for them?
Due to limited quality checks & moderation over time, the vast majority of our job title data (3.2M approved job titles) are not frequently used.
Most of our salary submissions are associated with only ~2% of job titles and we’re still working on normalizing similar job titles.
1
Duplicative data
Pay data for the same role is scattered across countless "duplicate" job titles.
2
Prioritization issues
Showing different and less relevant job titles ahead of exact matches in the search results.
3
Lack of flexibility
Difficult for users to recover from incorrect searches and hitting data empty states.
TECHNICAL SOLUTION
Handling job title hierarchy complexity & edge cases
BUSINESS CHALLENGES
How might we improve the UI to encourage further content engagement on Glassdoor?
A key challenge is that many users visit Glassdoor, passively consume information, and then leave. This represents a missed opportunity to surface the value of deeper pay, company, and job insights on Employer Profiles.
However, the current presentation of salary data does not encourage further exploration and often leads to misinterpretation.
BUSINESS SOLUTIONS
