A monstrously redesign. The purple monster. The monster flop. Ok I’m not that creative with my one-liners. Apparently, neither is monster:
“Monster’s new job search is easier than ever! To apply for the job is 65% faster than before!”
Who is marketing this? I’m trying to find a job not buying the Bullet blender. Let’s take a look at this multi-multi-multi million dollar (18 million to be exact) redesign. I’ll get through some of the interface stuff and get to the real problems.
Job Search
The new search has been simplified, and gives faceted search filtering, like SimplyHired or Indeed, so you can filter your results.
The search results are not that good however. I searched for “Marketing coordinator” in Toronto (Canadian site) and I find perfect matches, but towards the bottom of the page. I then dived a few pages deep and I’m still finding perfect matches mixed in with irrelevant ones; I’m even finding results from Edmonton.
My biggest problem is that every thing seems be in ajax’d. Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean its a good idea.
Application Process
Clicking into a job I see Monster’s standard job posting page. What has changed here? Well, I see an ajax box, omnipresent at the bottom of my screen. I click to find out more about the application process, but I’m met with a login screen. I can imagine this is an executive decision to increase registered users, because most userface designers will tell you this is a goal barrier. Not much else has changed here, let’s move on.
Profile & Resume
Clicking on the menu to access the tools, I get a fancy ajax box asking me for my login. If I haven’t registered yet, and I want to take a look at the resume builder I wouldn’t be able too. The site borders on arrogant with their constant demands for you to register. I went through the painful registration process (2 steps and too many input fields), got past another 2 ajax prompts to prepare the form, and finally got to build a resume.
Note: The 2nd prompt has a funny checkbox that most people probably wouldn’t notice:
When I look at the status of my resumes they say private even if I leave this checked, so what does this do?
Here is where ajax is useful. I feel like I’ve been overly critical thus far so I’ll say this is a half-decent implementation. I’ve seen better though. 
Career Mapping
Here is a tool that I found interesting. I’m not entirely sure it is all that useful for me (I know what jobs I can get to move forward) but it might be interesting for some other people. I think they must use there large data set of resumes to get common career paths. The interface is pretty easy (even if it is flash).
What’s Really Wrong
Ok I’ve touched on some interface items but let’s look at the big picture. Monster completely missed the boat here. Instead of looking ahead and innovating they have made existing processes “65% faster” with excessive use of a poor ajax UI. The social web was obviously not considered in the redesign. How can this have been ignored?
Traffic on Monster hasn’t been going down because their interface was poor, they are losing traffic because their business model is becoming poor. Charging a fee for posting a job is maddening to me. There are so many ways of doing it for free!
Monster is the new AOL.
I think Monster also failed in the way this was released. I’m a big advocate of progressive product deployment, releasing features gradually so you don’t shock your users. This is one of the big advantages with developing for the web, and companies like Google have mastered it.
It’s really hard to see .com companies fall from their innovative beginnings. At one point you have to look back and think “what did we do right to get here?”.
If my 30-minute User Experience (UX) is any indicator of Monsters “success”, then it is truly a monstrous design. I went in there for one simple reason: to renew the date on my resume. A half-hour later, I figured out how to do it.
I have used Monster since late 2002 and this is the third (noticeable) design change I’ve seen, and it seems to be the worst, especially considering that things should be getting easier for me, not harder. The Monster IT people should have been learning from past mistakes and improving things, not making it more frustrating.
Here’s one specific of my experience. I could not find any “renew” function anywhere for my one resume. When I clicked the “Actions” button a pop-up showed, but was “behind” some apparent advertisement that I couldn’t remove. It’s hard to describe without a screen-shot, but I couldn’t get to the “Edit” function in the pop-up to update the resume. I had to make five bogus copies of my resume to lower the advertisement enough so that I could see all of the action choices on the pop-up.
Secondly, I always thought Monster’s simple “Renew” function made sense because you could renew the date without going into the resume, touching something, then re-saving it. I always thought CareerBuilder’s forcing you to touch the resume was stupid. But now the “Renew” function is apparently gone.
I could not find a HELP file anywhere. I saw no Release Notes, or references to which, telling me what some of the functional differences were. My resume looks like a mess. Do I need to re-upload it? I have no idea, but if it puts me through more trouble than I’m sure I’ll be re-uploading everything tomorrow.
YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME !!
This is good functional design?!?!? Good QA?!?!?
I saw your post time-stamped just 15 minutes prior to my infuriating UX.
I could go on, but your final comment said it best: Monster is the New AOL — the ultimate insult.
Brian Coffey
Comment by Brian Coffey — January 15, 2009 @ 6:04 am
Hi Kurt, From what I’ve seen : the interface like igoogle – you need to register and set it up with your own widgets to see the real changes.Then yhou have a presonalized page when you sign in – and you select the info you want to see. The career mapping is probably good for graduates and peoplejust starting out on their career – I also don’t understand how two steps is a painful registration process ! ?
Comment by ROD — January 15, 2009 @ 9:11 am
@Brian – It’s nice to get the prospective of a seasoned user. Admittedly I’ve only used Monster for some casual job searching (I’ve never been a fan of the site). I’ll completely agree with you with the interface problems – I didn’t have the patience to write all of them down.
@ROD – Never make a 1 step process into a 2 step one. “Painful” might be dramatic, but these types of things really bug me. Gradual engagement techniques are much more effective: http://www.svennerberg.com/2008/09/gradual-engagement/
Comment by jarchowk — January 15, 2009 @ 12:07 pm
Sure,
I concur – but didn’t it used to be like a 5 or 6 step process – so 2 steps is a reduction ?
Comment by ROD — January 15, 2009 @ 12:57 pm
That’s pretty much in line with “65% faster”. It is definitely an improvement, but it is uninspirational for a large internet company, and disapointing for shareholders who fit the 18 million dollar bill.
Comment by jarchowk — January 15, 2009 @ 3:14 pm