Overview

Shift aims to connect veterans who are ready for their next job with recruiters looking to fill high-growth roles with extraordinary candidates and increase diversity within their company. 

The Challenge

As a skilled writer with a background in marketing, I was brought on initially to help with copywriting for the website. But as a product designer, I knew that in order to craft the best copy, I needed to start with research. So I conducted user research to better understand the problems veterans faced to get hired and the problems recruiters faced when trying to hire veterans. Then I reviewed the existing product’s information architecture to ensure that the full user experience made sense from start to finish before crafting copy for the final product. 

Result

My copy and landing page designs launched on December 9, 2016. Since then, the layout has shifted (no pun intended) to include a few variations for testing inbound interest in the product.

My Role: First Product Designer

I worked as the sole product designer pre-launch. A visual designer had mocked up some webpage layouts in Sketch, and I built the UX, UI, and brand from there.

critical Design Decisions

1. Conducting a UX Tear Down before copywriting

Doing a quick UX tear down with specific user stories in mind gave me an intimate understanding of the product, its successes, and its gaps. I treated each user story as a design challenge. I reflected on who the user was, their situation and motivations to use the product, noted my assumptions and questions, then wrote a task flow and identified screens to sketch wireframes for.

After writing out task flows, I saw that the final form needed to be designed to collect information that Shift would need from veterans. I drew a few versions on paper first, and then moved into Sketch to show how information would be displayed in empty, filled, and error states. 

Empty State

Error State

2. Creating a Design Persona for Shift to help with brand and copy.

3. Adapting my design process for copywriting 

I used the best insights from UX research to craft compelling copy. My process included:

1. UX Research to identify pain points. (For more on my typical UX research process, see Chime or Countable case studies.)

2. Collecting information on the product and organizing it into the following categories. (I used this blog post as a reference)

   • Description

   • Purpose

   • Price

   • Features

   • Benefits / Prime Benefit

   • Guarantee

   • Prospect

   • Objective

   • Offer

   • Deadline

   • Method of Payment

   • Method of Ordering

3. Drafting headlines and sub-headlines and putting them into Sketch to see what looked best.

4. Then I wrote the body copy by pulling from the features and benefits sections above and the pain points from the research.

Ex. “Never wonder how a Platoon Commander fits into your company again.” was pulled from anecdotes recruiters and veterans had told me about not knowing how to translates veterans’ skills into the civilian world.

Landing Page for Companies

Landing Page for Veterans