With all due respect to the hard working people at Aquent | Vitamin T, the native app for their job search is terribly outdated and quite frustrating. As someone who went through the process of looking for full-time/contract employment during the COVID-19 Pandemic, I wondered if I could quickly research and mock-up a better engaging app. 

During my initial research/breakdown of the app, I found four major usability issues with the login page, the onboarding flow, check in process and searching for jobs. Let’s take a look.

Login page - Minor Usability Problem

At first glance, the app has no disernable location on which text box is for user and which text box is for password. While I appreciate the option to stay logged in, there is no option to recover my password if I forget it, or have to reinstall the app.

Onboarding Flow page - Minor Usability Problem

When I tapped the “Don’t have an Aquent account?” link, this is the modal that appeared. While I understand the need to connect with an agent first, sending users to a desktop browser first is unnecessary 

and time consuming. All of the functions of the desktop browser should be able do be done on the app.

Check In process page - Major usability problem

Once the user has logged in and gained access, they are automatically asked to make a major decision on their work availability before any information has been shared. This is the case every single time the user has logged in. That is frustrating and should be moved to a profile/settings section.

Job Search page - Usability catastrophe

Now that the user has selected their work availability, another hurdle appears. Sending users away from the app to search for jobs is counter-intuative. When I tapped on the link, the job listings did appear in the app, but it disappeared after about 2 seconds. Major technical and usability issues here. 

There were a few more UX and technical issues in the app, but these four items have the highest priority to be corrected.

Armed with all this information, I took it upon myself to construct a more robust and easier to use app. I gave myself a few days to produce a workflow, sketch up a few pages, and dive right in to HIGH DEF wireframes. The latter was much more challenging than I imagned and probably wouldn’t recommend to most anyone.

Overall, I believe it’s a vast improvement on the current app and I’m making continuous updates. The prototype can be found here.

Workflows

Sketches

Hi-def wireframes

Prototyping