A JACK of All Trades

I am a student at the Harvard Kennedy School. Like most students, after graduate school I hope to gain meaningful employment. Also like most students, I don’t think I will find it through JACK.

Jobs And Careers for Harvard Kennedy School (…“JACK”) is the Harvard Kennedy School’s flagship career development tool. The online tool is meant as a two-sided market place (cf. “platform”) between students / alumni at HKS seeking jobs, and employers seeking job applicants.

In this blog post, I will discuss two core parts of the site: the user interface, and the experience of marginal users (“edge cases”).

JACK’s user interface presents the viewer with a plethora of options, ranging from making a career coaching appointments, to searching job options, or signing up for employer briefings. This catch-all approach presents the user with many tools, seemingly giving the user more choice.

My major claim about this user experience, however, is that it is akin to the website’s namesake, the jackknife. While each of these features may theoretically have some use, cf. the little fish-hook looking thing on a Swiss Army knife, the volume of tools significantly impairs the benefit of each individual appliance. The vast majority of Kennedy School students will come to JACK to look for a job, but by dominating the site with more functionality — each additional added system of course seeming like a good idea from the perspective of the designer — it becomes harder and harder to do this as the focus is removed.

My suggestion would be for the homescreen of JACK to begin with the user journey, asking what is wanted from the service, and in a few key questions diagnose the user’s core preferences. This would then open a limited version of the homescreen with the core functionality necessary.

(While there is some similarity here to Discover JACK, which is the original welcoming page, this does not link well to the user’s actual experience once the site is entered.)

2. Marginal User Experience

Moving on from the user interface, we travel to the experience of marginal users, for instance those with more experience, or those not seeking jobs in mainstream JACK employers.

Once again, a JACK namesake will be useful as metaphor: the Jack-in-the-Box. Standard users arrive to JACK to find a job listing from a major employer, where key information is needed (application details, deadlines, formats, qualification requirements, etc). This is within the box. This is fine. Once we need to go outside the box, for instance

My suggestion again links to the initial user interaction with JACK. If, instead of seeing a plethora of entry-level jobs, one could answer a series of questions about oneself, before presenting a customised homescreen, the user wouldn’t be scared by the JACK-in-the-box.

(N.B. I would compare the current approach to presenting a user of a dating app with unfiltered choices, without checking for preference; Grindr would likely be much less taken up if users saw women on the homescreen).

JACK correctly targets a multiplicity of users, from Job Seekers (HKS Students, Alumni) to Job Providers. In the below stakeholder mapping we demonstrate the — unfortunate — inverse correlation between these stakeholders’ importance for JACK, i.e. how much the system needs users to engage in order for JACK to succeed, and JACK’s importance to the stakeholders, i.e. how willing they will or will not be to put resources into the system.

Job-Seekers:

Administrative Actors:

Job-Suppliers:

Building on the themes explored in this blog post, some key JACK moments are highlighted…

2. Mobile

3. Branding

4. Interoperability / Standardisation

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