TheLadders

TheLadders is a career platform focused on high-paying roles for experienced professionals. Known for curating jobs with salaries of $100K and above, it offers personalized job matching, resume tools, and career resources to help users take the next step in their careers.

Role

Senior Product Designer

Responsibilities

UX/UI design, prototyping, user research

Collaborators

Product, Engineering, User Research, Executive leadership

Timeline

6 months (2013–2014)

🧠 Problem

TheLadders’ job search experience was built primarily for desktop, and hadn’t translated well to mobile. The existing apps felt dated and clunky, with friction across core flows like search, filtering, and applying to jobs. This was a missed opportunity—mobile was where job seekers increasingly spent their time. We needed to rethink the experience from the ground up to make job search fast, intuitive, and tailored to a modern mobile user.

🎯 Goals

Our goal was to modernize TheLadders’ mobile experience, making it easier for professionals to find and apply to high-paying jobs on the go. The redesign needed to improve usability, surface better job matches, and reflect a more polished, modern brand while supporting business goals like increasing profile completion and application rates.

Redesign the iOS and Android job search experience from the ground up
Improve usability across search, filters, and job application flows
Support better candidate–job matching through guided profile creation
Modernize visual design to align with an evolving brand
Increase engagement and drive more completed applications

🛠️ My Role

Owned end-to-end UX and UI design for iOS and Android
Conducted competitive audits and UX evaluations
Created new flows for search, filtering, job detail, profile setup, and saved jobs
Worked closely with product, engineering, and marketing teams
Contributed to evolving the visual language and component system

📋 Key Features

Guided Profile Creation – Helped users build detailed profiles based on experience, skills, and salary to enable more relevant job recommendations.
Modernized Job Search UI – Designed a mobile-native search experience with simplified filters, clear calls-to-action, and streamlined job browsing.
Job Detail + Application Flow – Revamped job detail screens to prioritize readability, key info, and a clearer apply experience.
Saved Jobs and Search History – Gave users tools to keep track of their job search journey across sessions.
Updated Visual System – Refined type hierarchy, color system, and component styling to create a more modern and professional feel.

📈 Outcomes

Delivered a complete overhaul of the mobile job search experience
Created a more intuitive and trustworthy app aligned with TheLadders’ premium positioning
Helped shift user perception of the platform from outdated to modern and mobile-friendly
Laid foundational work for future product iterations on mobile

Design studio

Design artifacts

Understanding the Context

Since this was Ladders’ first mobile app, we had a rare opportunity to define the experience from the ground up. We weren’t migrating legacy UX—we were building something entirely new. We started by referencing a set of “living” personas, shaped by years of customer insights, to guide our thinking. These personas helped us visualize real usage scenarios: someone browsing jobs during a lunch break, or saving listings to revisit later at a desktop.

Designing for mobile meant rethinking how job seekers engage with the platform. We mapped out the constraints—limited screen space, frequent interruptions, no physical keyboard—and identified native capabilities that could enhance the experience, like location services, speech-to-text, and camera input.

User personas

Collaborative Design Studio

To quickly generate ideas and align across the team, we ran a series of design studios. These working sessions brought together product, engineering, design, and stakeholders to sketch and share concepts in real time. It helped us move fast, surface promising ideas, and ensure everyone had a voice early in the process.

We explored solutions across key flows—search, filtering, job detail, and profile setup—with a focus on simplicity, readability, and fast task completion on mobile.

Prototyping & Longitudinal Testing

With a clear direction, we built an interactive prototype and launched a six-week longitudinal study. The goal was to observe how real users interacted with the app over time—not just in a one-off usability test. We conducted weekly sprints that included user interviews, design iteration, and reprioritization based on findings.

This approach allowed us to test riskier hypotheses early, build empathy across the team, and stay tightly focused on the features that mattered most to users.

Guided onboarding helped tailor job matches from the start, based on user goals, skills, and salary expectations.

Key Insights & Iteration

We validated some of our core assumptions early: users wanted to discover jobs on the go, and expected to be able to take action quickly. But we also uncovered deeper insights:

Skepticism about results: Users weren’t sure if applying would actually lead to responses from recruiters.
Desire for flexibility: The ability to save jobs for later review emerged as a must-have, not a nice-to-have.
Job matching needed work: Feedback surfaced issues with the relevance of search results, prompting a mid-project rebuild of our sorting algorithm.

These learnings helped us reprioritize features, reframe the UX around user trust, and invest early in infrastructure changes that would have long-term impact.

One of our surveys and a weekly findings recaps that were disseminated to the team