How JobAdder overhauled its UI with help from Pendo

Sydney-based JobAdder’s goal is to help recruiters identify top candidates and streamline the process of interviewing and hiring, so that they can focus more on the people they’re evaluating and less on managing the logistics. That means JobAdder’s product team is constantly looking for ways to improve the platform’s efficiency.

Recently, Akhila Bhatt, a senior product manager at JobAdder, and her team have been hard at work overhauling the platform’s user interface, and Pendo has been an integral tool throughout the project. The team is using Pendo’s analytics capabilities to help identify which features should and shouldn’t be included in the new experience, and for prioritizing which get built first. They’re also using in-app surveys to collect feedback and keep track of their progress toward driving feature adoption.

User analytics save months of research time

Bhatt says the usage data Pendo provides has allowed the team to understand what users are actually doing in the app and where they’re running into friction in real-time. This allows them to make tactical decisions based on trends and behaviors, rather than relying solely on that qualitative—and often overwhelmingly negative—data drawn from one-to-one interviews.

“The loudest voices and the ones who tend to complain the most are the voices that you tend to hear,” Bhatt says. “[With Pendo data] you’re not just biased towards people who complain any more. You have some stats to back it up or challenge it.”

Bhatt said taking this approach to the revamp saved months of work for the team. Being able to see in just minutes that one feature on a page was engaged with 1,000 times per day while another wasn’t clicked on at all over the last six months made decision-making simple.

“We can’t manually interview all users of our product, and we can’t ask as many questions on surveys [as we can when exploring Pendo data],” she says. “It’s much, much quicker having something in the background collecting all this kind of information.”

Survey says…

Bhatt’s team is also using Pendo’s in-app messaging capabilities to carry out surveys. These help the team identify the features that need improvement and work on them post-release. Follow-up surveying allows them to measure whether their efforts are moving the needle in the right direction.

Recently, for instance, survey results indicated that many users found completing one particular task in the platform to be very inefficient. Digging into the usage data, Bhatt discovered that users had to open multiple features, each on their own page, to get the job done due to the way the new UI had been designed. So, the team decided to combine all of that functionality on a single page.

Bhatt says Pendo’s capacity to leverage product analytics to target and schedule the surveys makes conducting them much easier and saves time that would have otherwise been spent tying external data together with a dedicated surveying tool. “It’s so much easier to have segments in Pendo to do that,” she says.

Delivering the surveys in-app has meant engagement rates have been higher than traditional surveying methods, Bhatt said, and the feedback has been less negative than expected.

“You do have a sort of silent majority, who are sort of O.K. with the product but aren’t going to give you that feedback directly. To be able to place the survey in the app, in the product, at the time they’re using it makes it very powerful,” says Bhatt.