Nature Careers

The challenge

Nature Careers is the jobs side of a publisher that scientists already trust, and the platform wasn't really trading on that. Two quite different audiences were using the same pages, job seekers at every stage of a scientific career, and the organisations trying to hire them, and the structure hadn't been designed for either of them properly. The brief also asked for accessibility to be built in from the start rather than checked at the end, which changes how you work more than it sounds like it should.

My role

Senior UX Designer. Accountable for the design of the Nature Careers platform end to end, from discovery and research through to final delivery, working alongside brand, content and product teams across Springer Nature.

The approach

• Led discovery, running workshops and research with job seekers and hiring organisations before any of the design started.
• Redesigned the whole experience: landing pages, job search, employer profiles, content hubs and the application flows.
• Reworked the content architecture and navigation so people could move between roles, resources and employer information without guessing.
• Brought the interface into line with Nature's modernised brand direction.
• Designed to WCAG standards throughout, rather than treating accessibility as a pass at the end.
• Built a reusable set of components and patterns so later updates stayed consistent without needing me.
• Tested with users as the work went along, then took it through to final delivery.

What I learned

I spent too long early on treating this as a visual problem, mostly because that's what the brief led with. The testing kept saying something duller, that people couldn't find their way around, and the structure had to change before anything on top of it was worth doing. I also came to accessibility later in the process than I should have, and it's much cheaper the earlier you start. That sounds obvious written down and it wasn't obvious to me at the time.