You may have noticed that this blog has gone pretty quiet over the past few months. This is because that’s because I’m working pretty damn hard at the moment, consulting on the user experience design of the Madgex Job Board platform. If you’re wondering what that is, it’s a platform that powers a fair number of major job boards, including The Guardian, The Times, and about 100 others across the world. It’s various installations across the world receive in total roughly 2 million job seekers per week. In a sense, I’m the person who’s responsible for ensuring all those people are happy.

Job boards have much more to them than meets the eye – as well as the job-seeker facing UI, you also have a recruiter UI (where they post jobs and search resumes) and a very substantial CMS where the job-board owner can configure their site, manage marketing email campaigns and so forth. I’m currently applying an iterative research and design methodology each area in turn.

So, as you can imagine, my day to day work involves planning, running and overseeing a lot of user research, analysis and prototyping; plus whenever I have a spare breath I’m preaching the user-centred word. I’ve been doing a lot of interesting work on lazy registration, faceted navigation, and advanced search, but I’ve had to keep it all under wraps until the new version of the platform is well under way.

On 23rd September I’m giving a talk on Job Board User Experience Design at OnRec China. I know it’s unlikely I’ll see you there since it’s a conference for recruiters rather than interaction designers, but I’ll be posting my presentation on Slideshare in case you fancy a look.

Oh, and by the way, thanks for keeping me in your feed reader during the quiet past few months.