Feedback on my website? Helping engineers find teams who share their values

Okay - as requested!

I like the concept of looking for teams based on value factors rather than purely self-interested ones but there are a lot of problems with the site as it stands. Some of which have already been addressed by other contributors here. I endorse everything everyone else has already said.

1. I understand key : values - but you really need to make it a striking image / logo. Get a graphic designer on it and make it powerful.

2. The background just looks like a cheap and outdated CSS theme. It needs to appear much more modern and powerful. Again, get someone with an eye for style to look at those elements. At present, the whole site looks very dated which is an immediate turn-off to anyone who is visiting.

3. My biggest problem - to which others have also alluded - is that I simply have no idea who your target audience is. Currently, for example, I can see a team calling itself Medisas. So I clicked through and saw a very detailed profile of the team. I had no idea what I might find because no expectations were set on the main page.

However, even after I clicked through, I was none the wiser. Although I can see what the team does and there's lots of stuff about values, I have no idea whether the Medisas team is seeking more engineers; what sort of engineers they are seeking; what skills they seek; whether the team members are remote or on-site and, if the latter, where the site actually is. I don't even know whether the roles are paid or volunteer ones.

Actually, that is not quite true. The information is almost all there (apart from the specific skill sets) but it is not sufficiently dominant. It should all be presented to me before I start to read the verbiage. I don'twant to search about for information which will determine whether I want to continue reading about this team or look for another one. I want that first so I can bail out with minimum loss of my precious time if it is not suitable.

So :

a. Front page - actually explain what this site is for. Is it a jobs board? A volunteer board? A mixture? I have absolutely no idea.

Describe your visitor to him/herself. If they recognise themselves, they will stay. If they don't, you have not wasted their time.

b. put yourself in the position of someone looking to join a team and ask yourself what is important to them in terms of the order information is presented to them.

c. Same deal as with lynnetye's job scraping board: opportunities are time-limited so show that. I don't want to turn up on your website, find something I want to join and then discover that you are horribly out of date.

Talking of dates, it's something which many developers here need to think about. In an international world, we are all still too guilty of thinking locally. For example, 7-4-2017 means two different things. I'm assuming you are American and the date represents Independence Day. For me, however, this isn't the anniversary of the day we finally offloaded those pesky American but a much earlier date = the seventh of April which, as far as I am aware, has no special significance for either of us. All dates in all international projects should be displayed as dd-mmm-yyyy or mmm-dd-yyyy so that they are unambiguous. I can deal with JUL-4-2017 even though I would prefer 4-JUL-2017 because ther is no ambiguity. Either that or allow your visitors to set their date display preferences within the application.

I have no idea where you get these team details from or how current they are. I would like to know. Otherwise, as far as I can tell, you have just picked them off the internet and presented them as your own. The authenticity of the data matters to your visitors.

4. Your detail page: oh God - your branding has gone. The menu structure I saw on the main page has disappeared. I'm lost! There is no navigation ... oh, wait! There's a back arrow in the header! Really? What a missed opportunity! What you should have here is a consistent look and feel across your site.

Oh bloody hell! I just clicked on Reddit. That looks different again from the Medisas and whatever else it was I just clicked. And the Reddit page has no back arrow!

No! No! No! It is simply unacceptable that every detail page feels like a new website I have to learn before I get to the content.

Incidentally, I will say that your detail pages look so much cleaner and more professional than your front page. use the same fonts. All your detail pages need is consistency and re-ordering of information as previously described. Make your front page more like your detail page.

Think of your website like a car dealership. I should be able to go to the dealership, jump into any car (detail page) and just be able to drive it - because the accelerator, brake, clutch, steering wheel and handbrake are always in the same positions. There are differences of detail between cars (including gears so I left them out!) but the essential controls which allow me to make the car go are always, always in the same place. I will never get into a strange car, slam my foot on what should be the brake pedal and discover I am suddenly speeding to my doom.

The same applies to your website. Consistency matters,

5. Back to the main page. The selection criteria are unusual but, as others have said, the tags use up far too much screen space. I am currently using a 21" (53cm) monitor and I can't see any of the team boxes which I happen to know are below the bottom of my screen. My first impression was that I was clicking on various tags and they were changing colour and there was a message that nothing matched all the criteria. Except that you asked me to review the site, I would have walked.

I can see why tags might have seemed appealing but you cannot afford to sacrifice so much screen space.

So: redesign your selects so that each heading has a multi-select drop-down. You can always have your seven headings run vertically down the left hand side of the screen and display selection criteria

in a designated header selection <div> to the right. You would thus have seven lines for select instead of the current 15 / 16 or whatever it is.

I would like to be able to remove tags from that display line and have it update for me. I just want to click on the offending tag and have it disappear.

6. I worked out what the score thing was eventually. You could leave them there (I think you should) but just add a hover tooltip which says "The Reddit (or whoever) team matched x of the y criteria you selected." Oh! Okay. That's fine. I see Channing made a similar point, which I hadn't read at the time I stated writing this bit so I imagine it will be a common complaint.

While on that subject, if teams do match my criteria, they should be presented within the team box first and in black or other prominent text. Then there should be a break and then you should present the other values in grey as you do at present. That way, I intuitively know that I matched the first x criteria and the rest are also values of this team for which I did not actively search.

Remove the borders from the value tags in the team boxes. They are distracting and add no value. The CSS attribute cursor: pointer makes it clear they are clickable.

Actually, remove the hyperlinks from those criteria. I clicked on one and expected to be taken to a list of other teams with the specific value I clicked. Instead, the link went to the team page. That's fair enough but I can click on the team name to get there so remove the other hyperlinks - it makes for a cleaner user experience.

7. Finally, I have no idea how you make your money. That partly comes down to the "where do you get your information?" question I asked earlier. If you want to turn this into a business, you need to make it obvious and give teams a method to post the information you require. Right now, I imagine you have very carefully crafted each page which seems unsustainable. If you're doing something else, then it is not obvious what.

I apologise for the length of this post but you did ask me if I would have a look for you. I appreciate that the critique may come across as completely negative. It isn't meant to be. There is a lot of work to do to get this website up to professional standard butthere is nothing here which cannot be fixed and the core functionality seems to work well. If I had thought the situation was irredeemable, I would not have bothered to comment at all so take comfort from that!

Your issues are all about:

• presentation

• communication of website's purpose

• authenticity

• working out your business model

I hope I have given you some constructive food for thought. When you have had a think and redesigned the problem areas which we have all identified, I think you should post again so we can appreciate the difference!

Good luck!

Very clean, looks good and makes me want to explore further.

Problems...

1. I'm not able to figure out immediately why I'd want to use this site. Solution - change the headline to communicate that this is a job search site with a different/better solution for the problem

2. The list of values occupies 90% of the screen for me (Macbook pro). So when I select a value, it's not at all clear that there are results at the bottom that are changing

3. Team profile page has ample information, but the text needs a bit more breathing room IMO

4. Instead of saying "Value tags" in the sidebar, why not just say "Values"?

Big fan of the way you organize so many filters in such an easily-scannable way.

But what does the "0 / 0" in the top right of each business card mean? It might be useful to show a tooltip explaining this when a user hovers over it — or you could just explain it on the "About" page.

Lynne,

Now that I have my eyes back, some additional comments for you.

As I read through other people's comments and your replies, one thing came through to me very, very clearly. You seem to be hung up on the idea of communicating everything you have on one page.

Why?

People are very used to having a top level menu. It breaks information up into more digestible chunks and, especially when we are reading a screen, we can't absorb huge swathes of information in one hit.

What is wrong with a top level menu option which has options such as Philsophy, Cultural Values and then loads that content onto the current page seamlessly?

Analogy : imagine someone calling in a 999 (911) call. A woman is screaming hysterically at the operator and trying to say everything in one unordered, chaotic stream of consciousness. The operator has to fight her to get the necessary detail from her to in order to despatch the emergency crew and give them some idea of what to expect.

Second caller to 999 (911): obviously shaken by the emergency but she has taken a moment to compose herself. Calmly, she gives a headline summary of the incident (Road Traffic accident), where it happened, how many people are involved, how many of them appear to be responsive and a first glance assessment of the severity of their injuries. Even as she is still taking details, the operator has already sent three ambulances to the accident and continues to feed them information.

Same with your website. Break the information you wish to convey into logical, grouped units and then hide it away until I ask for it. You can do that on another page; via toggled content controlled by menu links or toggled content controlled by accordion menus.

Even your search terms, for example, could be contained within an accordion menu. Click and I see the search options; click and they are gone again and I can see the results or other important information.

So calm down and think about what I need to see and when I don;t need to see everything at once. What I do need is an intuitive method to manage the content blocks to suit my own user requirements. So I might clcik different things if I am just exploring your site from when I am actively seeking results. That's fine: that's how I want to use your site today. Keep it clean, simple and contained and expand what I need when I need it.

Also, you are presumably talking to two different audiences, those seeking a job and those offering one. They need different areas of your site to work within. Currently, there is no way for a team to provide you with information about their offerings. There should be and it should be obvious to me, as a visitor, that there is. Even if I do not have access to an employer account, I should be able to see that such a thing exists. Why? It's all about credibility. It is simply not credible that these offerings simply "arrived" on your site. I have to know there was a mechanism by which they got there.

Also, whatever these "values", they need to have a definition. A glossary page where I can click on each value and see how you have defined it would be useful both as a potential employee and a potential employer so we are all speaking the same language from the start.

Hey Lynn, I've actually worked on this problem quite a few years ago so I've been through this before. I'll answer your questions first and then give some general feedback.

• What should search results show? What search? I have no idea where your search bar is.

• Do team profiles provide enough info? I've been a UX researcher before and this isn't the best question to ask. What do you consider to be "enough"? Many people here will have a different definition of that. To me, yeah I guess this has good cultural issues, but I'd like to see all of the cultural values and see which ones a company faults at. You seem to only highlight the positives, and don't focus on things people care about outside of culture (i.e. money). I don't care if it's a fun place to work with a great culture if I'm being paid way below market value.

• What questions should I put on the "About" page? Ask your users! I can't give you a prescription for what should go there unless I know your audience and what they're actually asking.

Generally, if you are going to work in this space, your biggest issue is incentivizing info curation. The best sources are from the active employees or alumni, and the fact is they are diametrically opposing views. Generally if you've left something was amiss or not perfect, and if you're there you might have rose-colored glasses. As they say, there's 3 sides to every story: your side, their side, and the truth. It's going to be very hard to get unbiased view of an office without actually going there yourself.