Overview
Finding a job can involve navigating multiple websites, understanding unfamiliar job requirements, tracking skills, preparing a resume, and figuring out where opportunities are located.
As part of the development team at the Durham Workforce Authority, I contributed to Jobs First Durham, a mobile workforce platform designed to bring these activities into one accessible experience.
The application gave users access to:
- Job searching and discovery
- Interactive job mapping
- Skills management
- Resume building
- Labour market information
- Notifications
- Employment resources
- User registration and authentication
My role combined UI/UX thinking with frontend and full-stack development. I helped translate requirements into user flows and application experiences, improved navigation, designed and implemented mobile interfaces, and worked across the frontend and backend to bring those experiences to life. The platform ultimately supported 10,000+ users.
Role: UI/UX Designer & Full-Stack Developer
Timeline: Sept. 2024 – Apr. 2025
Platform: Mobile
Tools: Figma, Miro, React Native, JavaScript, Firebase, Node.js, Mapbox
The Challenge
How might we make the job-search experience more accessible and intuitive?
Job seekers often need to accomplish several related tasks during their employment journey.
They may need to:
- Discover relevant opportunities
- Search and filter jobs
- Understand where opportunities are located
- Evaluate whether a position matches their skills
- Manage their skills and career information
- Create or update a resume
- Keep track of relevant opportunities
The challenge wasn’t simply to build a job board.
The larger challenge was to create a cohesive mobile experience that connected these different activities together without overwhelming users with information or navigation options.
Users
The primary audience was people using workforce and employment services to explore career opportunities.
The platform needed to support users who wanted to:
- Find employment opportunities
- Explore jobs based on location
- Understand their skills
- Prepare application materials
- Access career and labour-market resources
This meant the interface needed to prioritize clarity, discoverability, and straightforward navigation.
My Role
I worked across both the design and development sides of the product.
UX / Products:
- Translated requirements into application flows and features
- Considered how users would navigate between major tasks
- Helped organize information and application functionality
- Identified opportunities to improve navigation and usability
- Considered the relationship between job discovery, maps, skills, and resumes
UI:
- Developed mobile interfaces and reusable components
- Structured layouts and interactions for different application features
- Implemented responsive mobile experiences
- Worked with maps and data-driven UI components
Development:
- React Native
- JavaScript
- Node.js
- Firebase
- REST APIs
- Mapbox
Working across design and engineering gave me a different perspective: every design decision had to work for both the user and the product technically
Understanding the product
The application was built around several interconnected user needs.
Rather than treating job search as an isolated feature, the product connected it with supporting career tools.
Core experience
Discover → Explore → Evaluate → Prepare → Act
A user could discover opportunities, explore jobs through search or location, evaluate the opportunity, prepare through their skills and resume, and ultimately move toward applying.
This relationship between features influenced how the application’s navigation and information architecture were structured.
Information Architecture
The challenge was making these capabilities feel like one product rather than a collection of disconnected features.
User FLOW: Logging into account
One of the key experiences was guiding users entrance into the application
The flow was designed around giving the user a brief overview of what to expect from the app.
Designing the navigation
One of the key UX challenges was deciding how users should move between the application’s different capabilities.
The application contained several major destinations:
- Jobs
- Map
- Skills
- Resume
- Notifications
- Other workforce resources
If too many options are presented equally, navigation can become difficult to scan.
I therefore focused on making the major tasks easier to discover and reducing friction when moving between sections.
This work contributed to a 30% improvement in application navigation.
Design principle: Put the user’s most important tasks within easy reach while keeping secondary functionality organized rather than competing for attention.
JOB DISCOVERY
The job-search experience was one of the application’s core functions.
Users needed to be able to quickly understand:
- What the job was
- Who was hiring
- Where the job was located
- Whether the opportunity was relevant
- How to access additional information
The interface therefore needed to support quick scanning rather than requiring users to open every listing before understanding its basic information.
UX considerations
Discoverability: Users should immediately understand where they can find employment opportunities.
Scannability: Important job information should be understandable without excessive interaction.
Filtering: Users should be able to narrow opportunities based on relevant criteria.
Continuation: Once a user identifies an interesting opportunity, moving into the details should feel natural.
JOBS MAPS
One of the more distinctive features of the application was the interactive Jobs Map, powered by Mapbox.
Traditional job boards primarily present opportunities as lists.
The Jobs Map introduced a spatial perspective:
Where are the opportunities?
This was particularly useful because employment isn’t only about the job itself. Location can be an important part of whether an opportunity is practical for a user.
The map allowed users to explore employment opportunities geographically and select opportunities based on their location.
Why this mattered
The map complemented rather than replaced traditional job search.
Users could approach discovery in two ways:
List-based discovery
“What jobs are available?”
Location-based discovery
“What opportunities are available around me?”
This created another pathway through the same employment information.
Design & Development Process
My approach was closely connected to the development lifecycle.
Rather than designing an interface independently and handing it over to another team, I worked across the process:
From Design to Implementation
One of the biggest advantages of working on this project as both a designer and developer was being able to immediately understand how design decisions translated into implementation.
For example, when designing a mobile interface, I had to consider:
- Screen size
- Touch interactions
- Navigation patterns
- Reusable components
- API data
- Loading states
- Dynamic content
- Map interactions
- Performance
- Technical feasibility
This reinforced an important principle in my design approach:
Good UI isn’t just visually appealing—it needs to work within the context of the product, the user, and the technology.
Visual Design
The interface was designed around creating a clear and accessible mobile experience.
Key UI considerations included:
Hierarchy: Important information needed to stand out from supporting content.
Consistency: Reusable interface patterns helped users understand how different parts of the application worked.
Accessibility: Controls and information needed to remain understandable and usable across mobile screens.
Simplicity: Because the application contained many features, individual screens needed to avoid unnecessary complexity.
Iteration
The application evolved through implementation and feedback.
As features were developed, navigation and interaction patterns were reviewed and refined.
This was particularly important because seemingly small navigation decisions could have a significant effect when applied across an application with multiple major features.
The resulting improvements contributed to a 30% improvement in navigation.
Impact
10,000+ Users: The application was designed and developed for a real workforce audience and supported 10,000+ users.
30% Navigation Improvement: Improvements to the application’s navigation contributed to a 30% improvement in navigation, demonstrating the impact of focusing on information organization and user accessibility.
Multiple Employment Workflows: The platform brought several employment-related activities together: Job Search + Map + Skills + Resume + Notifications + Labour Market Resources
Rather than solving a single problem, the product supported multiple stages of the user’s employment journey.
What Worked
1. Connecting related workflows: Job discovery, skills, resumes, and location information were brought together rather than forcing users to rely on separate experiences.
2. Multiple discovery methods: The combination of traditional job search and geographic discovery gave users more than one way to find opportunities.
3. Mobile-first accessibility: Putting employment resources into a mobile application made the experience accessible from a device users could carry with them.
4. Clearer navigation: Improving the organization of the application made it easier for users to access its major features.
Key Takeaways
Designing for users means designing around their goals: The project reinforced that an application shouldn’t be organized purely around its technical features. It should be organized around what users are actually trying to accomplish.
Information architecture has a major UX impact: When an application contains many features, how those features are organized can be just as important as how individual screens look.
Location can change how users discover information: The Jobs Map demonstrated that sometimes users benefit from seeing information spatially rather than only through lists.
Design and engineering work better together: My involvement in both UI/UX and development gave me a deeper understanding of the relationship between design decisions and technical implementation.
My Role in one Sentence
I helped transform a complex set of workforce services into a cohesive mobile experience by improving navigation, designing user-focused workflows, and implementing the interfaces that brought those experiences to life.
Final Reflection
Jobs First Durham changed how I think about digital product design.
Before the project, I primarily thought about applications from an engineering perspective: How do we build this?
Working on a product with real users pushed me to think more about:
Who is using this?
What are they trying to accomplish?
How quickly can they find what they need?
What information should they see first?
What happens when they get stuck?
Those questions have become an important part of how I approach product development.
The experience also showed me that my software engineering background can complement my interest in UI/UX. I don’t just think about how an interface looks—I understand how the interface connects to the underlying application and how design decisions ultimately become working product experiences.
