Design, product and rock and roll

Meet, as usual, on clothes. And there are quite a few requirements for your onion, especially if you are the most noticeable HR-tech phenomenon in the country. Being a complex and non-trivial service, hh.ru throws a lot of interesting challenges to designers, handles out a lot of unique and really complex product tasks and requires painstaking work with such interfaces and data that you will hardly find anywhere.

We tell who hh.ru designers are and how they live, what is important for us, where we suffer and how we celebrate victories. About how we go on a thorny path to the heights of building a high-quality, easy-to-understand and easy-to-use service interface.

Evolution or death

It’s scary to think, but just six years ago hh.ru interface reigned in complete chaos: a slurred color palette, 36 types of different buttons, many components responsible for the same thing, though looking differently, and navigation that no longer met the needs a growing service because it was designed without scalability. Together, this was a global problem and the reason for the negative user experience: users suffered, pricked and lost in an abundance of obscure elements, but still ate a cactus and looked for work using hh.ru.



Since then, we have changed a lot, but we didn’t go with broad prospects for redesign, but a serpentine of evolutionary changes. From the moment we stepped on the path of intensive change, we had a well-established brand book, we developed four mobile applications on iOS and Android, the site itself became more convenient and much nicer. Through trial and error, we have built a clear understanding of how we want to look and what we should not be.



When developing UX solutions, we follow the main principle: we do our best to make it easy, simple and clear for the user to exist in our service. It is important for us that the user is able to extract the maximum profit from our product so that nothing distracts him from the cherished goal of finding a job, while spending a minimum of effort and nerves.

Developers think about technical limitations and opportunities, products about achieving business goals, and designers care about users and their needs. The task of the designer to do everything possible so that the user can understand their tasks intuitively and intuitively. A good user experience is more important than aesthetics, as well as our assumptions about what it should be.

Hh.ru users should experience positive emotions by default, so we pay a lot of attention to the language of the interface, the elaboration of illustrations of screens and actions, and the elaboration of microanimation of interactivity. We design a design based not on assumptions, but on a study of user experience. The key vector for today is mobile first, and this is no coincidence. 80% of the traffic comes to us from mobile devices, so the latest solutions first of all appear in our applications and the mobile version of the site.



In addition to the job seeker and employer sections of the main service, product designers also have other hh.ru projects, such as Talantix, the Payroll Databank, HRSpace and others.

Clearly understood

Before proceeding to the next task, we ask ourselves: “will it become clearer, more effective and more emotional?” This helps to focus on the important and eliminate non-key issues. In addition, there are top-level business goals of the company, and the products are responsible for their achievement. The product manager is a diver in the vast blue ocean of user interaction with the service. His task is to dive as deep as possible and fetch the biggest user pain or problem. He brings this pain to the team, and here designers come into the work, whose main task is to generate hypotheses that will help to heal this pain.



Hypotheses are transformed into prototypes, and prototypes are tested on users. Then work on the errors takes place, the failed hypotheses are rejected, and the best is brought to perfection. Then the prototype is combined with our design system and the layout is drawn. The designer, as Andy Warhol bequeathed, becomes a star for 15 minutes, in our case, an art director: in the pre-release demo, he has a decisive voice and it is he who blesses the task of going into production.

Sounds like a call

Today, in the context of our product design, several important areas can be distinguished. For example, we are developing our own design system. Now, it seems, all medium and large companies are doing this, and not in vain: a well-developed design system is the key to the fastest and most manageable placement of design on industrial tracks. Now the design system in hh.ru is atomic - it describes various components: check-boxes, buttons, input fields, tabs, etc., and, alas, it is still far from perfect, since it was originally created to work with desktop, and times and the main sources of traffic are changing rapidly.

We follow our internal code of laws of Hammurabi - the UX manifest. This is the holy book of our rules and patterns, the foundation on which to understand good design in terms of user experience. UX-manifest is a kind of checklist, thanks to which the designer understands that the task being issued meets the specified standards. This manifest is used in all products of the company and is one of the main working tools.

Another important focus is use tests, testing our hypotheses on live users. We try to work on the bugs and bring only the best to production. We set clear criteria by which the designer should evaluate the success of the task in order to minimize the risk of fakap and loss of resources that go to the work of a huge team consisting of developers, products, projects and marketing.

In faces

There are 11 of us in total. We are introverts, but very friendly: we communicate with each other during the working day, once a month we get out somewhere with the whole team to hunt for steaks and drink wine, or break down at some conference in St. Petersburg. The rest of the time, everyone has a rest in their own way: someone is fond of quadrocopters, someone jumps with a parachute, walks around exhibitions, hikes, mountains and trekking or runs marathons.

Sasha Nikishenkov

Art Director. It guides the true path, tries whenever possible not to interfere with other designers to work efficiently (and sometimes spectacularly), in any incomprehensible situation it helps with processes and the resolution of doubts. Sasha loves traveling and traveling, a glass of good dry and a fireplace, as well as the ocean and windsurf.

Zhenya Shlandina

The oldest in the product design of the employer. Could draw illustrations, but instead builds harmony between the pains of business and the employer. He walks higher and longer into the mountains to enjoy the contrast of office everyday life.

Sonya Pashchenko

UI-designer. He is engaged in the redesign of all promotional pages of the service and the creation of new sections, improving the visual range, adding friendliness and clarity. Typography, shadows, colors, and pixels are her true friends.

Sasha Ashurov

Brand Designer hh.ru. Designs almost all marketing projects. He drags himself from gymnastics and can twist a saltuha. He likes to study and create fonts, produces electronic musicians, the most famous of them are DJ Electric and Luckystars.

Marina Usacheva

The designer of the marketing department and the internal corporate style part-time. It is happy that “beloved work” and “work” have become synonymous. I embarked on the true path at the university, choosing the direction of “Visual Communications”. She loves graphics and ballet - everything related to aesthetics.

Tanya Galak

When Tanya was a student, she considered computer graphics to be just a hobby, but the hobby grew into a profession. He likes to create useful for users. He loves yoga, books and travel.

Kolya Mikhailov

Senior grocery designer. Together with the product and the development team, it ensures that job seekers are satisfied, happy and employed. Can assemble, launch, smash, find, repair and restart the quadrocopter.

Zhenya Nazarova

Senior Product Designer at hh.ru. Develops Talantix CRM system for recruiters, generates ideas, tests hypotheses and makes users happier. And Zhenya loves to walk. Walking is about Zhenya. Eugene and walking are like Bonnie and Clyde, Cid and Vicious, Erich and Maria Remarque. In short, just made for each other.

Kostya Kozyrev

Grocery designer. Having renounced the craft of writing code, he stood on the bright side of user peace and health. Likes to argue, deep house and oldtimer cars.

Oleg Bukhtiyar

Develops a mobile application for applicants. He walks around the office with two phones and always compares iOS with Android. Runs like Forrest Gump.

Nastya Vinokurova

Product Designer. Turned on analytics and social psychology. This is what helps her design interfaces that not only solve business problems, but also make the user happier. She loves to sing songs of her own composition, Batman and French films. Have you ever tried to sing Batman? This is incredibly difficult. But Nastya can.

Our bro

These are structural guys who distinguish work from a house from working in a creative agency. Our product designer understands the value of the development process, takes part and realizes the value of product research, where user experience is one of the most important criteria for design decisions. You can easily become part of the hh.ru design team if you know self-irony and healthy cynicism.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/undefined/