Comments on: A Monster of a redesign

By: jarchowk

jarchowk — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:14:19 +0000

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.

By: ROD

ROD — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 12:57:20 +0000

Sure,
I concur – but didn’t it used to be like a 5 or 6 step process – so 2 steps is a reduction ?

By: jarchowk

jarchowk — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 12:07:22 +0000

@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/

By: ROD

ROD — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 09:11:44 +0000

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 ! ?

By: Brian Coffey

Brian Coffey — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 06:04:38 +0000

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