Overview

 
 

Intro

Cheese Burger is a self-initiated project developed in collaboration with peers, designed to connect top design talents and emerging designers with forward-thinking companies. The platform offers a transparent, secure, and respectful job-search environment where companies can identify and recruit the best fit for their teams.

With a focus on growth and learning, Cheese Burger empowers designers to showcase their skills effectively, gain valuable insights during the recruitment process, and improve their professional presentation. By addressing the challenges designers face and fostering mutual understanding between employers and candidates, the platform creates a seamless and enriching hiring experience for all parties involved.

Problem

As designers, we recognized the challenging environment surrounding design employment in Taiwan. Many parents even discourage their children from pursuing design-related studies in college. Through our experiences, we frequently encountered the following issues:

For employers, many companies undervalue design or lack the knowledge to find designers who meet their needs. For designers, concerns often revolve around low salaries, lengthy and inefficient interview processes, and other frustrations. These insights highlighted the significant problems in the design employment landscape—problems we were determined to address.

 

Solution

We decided to build an online platform to solve the overall problems both designers and employers met in the design employment.

 

My Role

Product design, User Research

Timeline

6 month

Team Members

Product designer : Kida Shu

Photographer, Illustrator and Handbooks Design: Gazen Chen, Wen Han

Tools

Figma, Google survey, After Effect, Framer, Illustrator, Photoshop

Our Approach

 

1 . Research

Interviews

Surveys

Competitor analysis

Personas

2 . Design

Brainstorming

Wireframes

Feedback gathering

Hi-fi design

Interactive prototype

 

My Contribution

I led user research, the discovery workshop and synthesizing workshop for insights and ideas with the team. By collaborating closely with Kida Shu, one of another amazing designer, we get to finalize the UI designs.

Research

 
 

We conducted a survey through Facebook and various communities we are part of to uncover the challenges faced by designers. We collected over 500 responses from both designers and employers.

Following the quantitative survey with the broader public, we shifted our focus to qualitative insights by interviewing experts and key players in the design market. This included 15 design leads, HR professionals, headhunters, and executives from several successful companies.

 

Interviews highlights

 
 
 
 
 

 Personas

 

Competitor Analysis

We researched the four most widely used recruitment websites in Taiwan: 104 Human Resource Bank, Yourator, Mit.jobs, and LinkedIn.

For Employers

Employers find that talents’ abilities often do not match their needs after hiring.

 

Unclear portfolio designs make it difficult to evaluate designers’ abilities.

 

The recruitment process is often overly long and complicated.

 
 

For Designers

Designers are unsure whether their skills match the job descriptions on recruitment websites.

 

Designers often face unpleasant experiences with speculative work.

 

Fresh graduates are uncertain about what employers or design managers expect to see in their portfolios.

 

Design

 
 

Design Goals

  • Create a user-friendly platform that caters to both designers and employers.

  • Reduce the stress designers experience during the recruitment process.

  • Enable employers and HR teams to save time by focusing on finding the right talent efficiently.

 

 Information Architecture

Talents-Searching Service

We enhanced the talent search service by improving the presentation of designers’ portfolios. Enterprises can use machine learning technology to filter and identify designers who best match their team’s needs. Over time, as more employees are recruited, the platform’s recommendations become increasingly accurate, suggesting the most suitable talents for future hiring needs.

Passive Job Searching

Unlike traditional job-search methods on other platforms, we introduced a feature called ‘Passive Job Searching.’ Designers can post their ideal roles and preferred conditions, allowing employers to reach out to them directly. This approach accelerates the job-matching process and reduces conflicts during negotiations over benefits and compensation.

Additionally, leveraging big data on designers’ ideal roles and conditions, enterprises can gain insights into fair and competitive offerings when creating new job postings.

Targeted Portfolio

Applying for different positions requires tailored portfolios. Designers can select relevant works and compile them into a targeted portfolio. This approach allows designers to showcase their skills more effectively while helping employers better understand their qualifications. Additionally, when seeking a new job, designers can save significant time by avoiding the need to create a portfolio from scratch.

Creative Guiding

Thousands of professional projects are showcased on the platform, providing designers with inspiration and guidance on creating effective and strategic portfolios. Additionally, CheeseBurger emphasizes the ‘process’ behind each project, helping employers understand the reasoning and strategies behind the visuals, offering deeper insights into a designer’s capabilities. For junior designers, this approach encourages critical thinking about the question, ‘Why am I doing this?’ rather than simply presenting aesthetically pleasing work without clear logic.

Enhance Your Skills with Big Data

Big data is widely utilized today, and we have applied this concept to help designers gain a clearer understanding of their standing in the talent market. It also enables them to improve by exploring a variety of works on the platform.

With Cheese Burger, design projects can now be categorized based on factors such as payment rates, work experience, and skillsets. This allows designers to compare themselves with others and stay informed about market trends.

Online Test Assurance

Designers can complete design tests through our platform and sign contracts to safeguard their intellectual property rights. Similarly, enterprises can ensure the privacy of their test materials.

Cheese Burger makes the process of taking design tests more trustworthy and reliable. By acknowledging the effort behind the work, employers will understand that even a design test deserves fair recognition, or designers may feel their time is being wasted.

Automated Interview Scheduling

By displaying the entire team’s calendar in one view, HR can easily identify available time slots and create new events, even on a mobile device. By linking job openings with interviewees’ calendars, Cheese Burger automatically schedules the most convenient interview times for both candidates and employers. This feature significantly reduces the time required to manage multiple interview phases for various designers.

Quick Rating and Comparing

Employers can attach tests to job openings and send them to all candidates. Additionally, after each interview or test review, employers can collaboratively rate candidates on the platform and view the auto-generated average ratings for each designer. This system enables enterprises to quickly and effectively identify the highest-rated talents within their team.

What I learned

 
 

Skills such as wireframing, high-fidelity design, conducting interviews, creating surveys, analyzing research data, and developing personas were all critical to the project. Beyond these technical skills, the most valuable takeaway was the perspectives shared by the experts we interviewed. These invaluable insights would not have been gained without conducting this project.