At RAF Recruitment, the user journey for applications was plagues with drop-offs due to a cumbersome journey. Our mission was clear, enhance the user experience to boost sign-ups and minimise drop-offs, ensuring a seamless application flow.
RAF Recruitment contains all parts of jobs and education within the RAF. Due to the previous designer leaving, I stepped into the role of lead UX/UI designer to take on new requirements for the mobile first website. My main focus was maintaining brand consistency across all pages on the RAF Recruitment site, as well as designing user journeys for the application process of all roles.
Role Open User Journey
Role Closed User Journey
To solve application drop-offs, I developed two user journeys for the application process. Role Open and Role Closed, while quite similar had key changes that would nudge the user to a next step.
Role opened gave subtle hints with buttons and headers using the words “Apply Now” and “applying for” showing the user that the role they were applying for was open. At the final stage “Continue with your application” is the call to action - taking the user to an external page to provide more information about themselves.
Role Closed starts at the role page with the button stating “register your interest” giving a clue to users that the role is not open but that they can provide information ready for when it is open to applicants. In the second stage, users are once again reminded that the role is closed, but can continue entering their details. For Role Closed final stage, the user is shown related roles that might be of interest to them to apply for.
Looking at the data, we could see a large drop off during the application process. We realised going through as a user, that there was a point of tension when entering information regarding a role as it was only after submitting your details that you were told whether the role was open or closed.
After creating the two user journeys for the roles on the RAF site, we saw an increase in applications for roles open as well as an increase in interest in those roles that were closed. We were confident that this would be the outcome however, we noticed that applications from “similar roles” had also increased proving that the design had been used correctly.
For the RAF, the result was an increase in applications for both open and closed roles which enabled more people to be interviewed and hired - meeting the goal of RAF Recruitment.