Vin Park

User Experience Mapping



Yello is a company that is based around talent acquisition that provided recruiters a platform to hire qualified candidates through their own personalized Applicant Tracking Software or (ATS) and integrations with preexisting platforms such as Greenhouse.io and Workday. By utilizing the software, you are able to navigate through pools of candidates for any specific position and effectively communicate the next steps for them, or keep them in contact for any other positions in the future all in one easy location.


Their goal of finding capable and fresh talent has also led to the acquisition with WayUp to deliver a voice within early talent and how to connect them with companies seamlessly.


NOTE: This walk through is an example of the general process of the workflow and experience that I had at Yello with an example mock-up and process.

While familiarizing yourself within any industry is the standard for a new job, talent acquisition and job applications are not completely alien in concept to most people. Many people experience the first groans of frustration and confusion when applying to their first job or brushing up their resume for a new opportunity in a brand new city. It’s an arduous and lengthy process that can be daunting for many.


Yello was looking to solve this issue within the industry by tackling it from two fronts: within the ATS software that allowed recruiters to find specific candidate pools and through WayUp by helping early talent get their foot in the door.


My role was bridging together the two by investigating and addressing what users found frustrating and how they could be helped.

Yello and Internal Tools



How can companies better manage their talent pools and improve reach?


Each company has a different hierarchy that is organized to handle candidate recruitment into their own workforce. Depending on the company size, field, and qualifications, finding candidates can be a difficult. A number of factors can play into this such as: sheer bulk of resumes, repeated or mistyped information, spam and diminished responses, and so much more. With all these factors in mind, one of the dominating factors within ATS software is to utilize the data that is collected and showcase it in a more digestible format.


NOTE: This walkthrough is an example of the general process of the workflow and experience of internal tools within Yello.

There could be a number of roles within HR/Recruitment that have a variety of tasks that are specific to them that are not typical across others in their industry or field. The goal of creating a dashboard is to quickly access and customize a user’s experience and also fit their day to day schedule in an organized fashion. Since they may be quickly switching from mobile and desktop on the fly, it is important to translate those elements nicely.


The element of customizability also allows certain features to be utilized without appearing overtly “missing” or “empty” within the space.

Colors in addition to a robust icon system for future usage will add to the accessibility of the product and quickly allow people to make informed decisions with each day to day having different data. Consistency within the product will also allow ease of access to those new to the industry as veterans and newcomers will be able to use a product with much more peace of mind.

WayUp and Early Talent



What are the issues within early talent, and how do people approach job hunting?


Although WayUp and Yello are two separate companies, the initiative I worked on after streamlining the internal tools was to improve both the candidate and recruiter experience as both often cross paths and work in tandem with each other. The challenge is finding where the threads of commonality are within the voices, and which ones will land the most amount of impact. The beginning of the WayUp project started out with paid recorded User Interviews conducted at an hour intervals over the course of two weeks. The main objective of these interviews were to gather initial impressions of the conversation and review subsequent data with the team. 


NOTE: This walkthrough is an example of the general process of the workflow and experience with improving the WayUp experience centralized around the user.

The results of the interviews revealed that many candidates have no idea where to start and felt overwhelmed by the whole process. The ideologies that their parents had grown up with had not translated very well over to the current generation, and there was something that had not come up in conversation before—internationalization. 


While many applicants have been from the United States, there was a sizable amount of international candidates that had similar problems but had different underlying circumstances to work in another country. While a company may not be able to tackle all of these issues at once, if broken down into more manageable pieces, they can lay the foundation for future implementation while not disrupting the current workflow.


The end goal was to develop a modular design system that would be able to implement numerous features over time while not sacrificing the design elements.

Similar to Yello’s focus on iconography and color to guide the user, consistency with such elements are going to help even across WayUp’s products as future implementation will allow the transition to be much smoother and more seamless for pre-existing users. The goal of a redesign is to introduce features that will immediately help the user’s journey whilst also laying the path for future implementations that don’t work backwards. In this way, it becomes more time efficient and conscious of the impact for the users and company alike.

Deadlines are often the key factors for determining how the design process will be affected alongside development. While being able to improve the entire flow of a product from ground up would be a solution that is great in theory, on a bigger scale it is not feasible. The choice for a modular design accounted for this.


Engineers need time to run and test components for any issues and understand best how adding or removing something would affect the current system. Project managers are constantly in conversation with clients and what they are actively seeking and notice within the industry. There are many moving parts that affect the decisions made and designers are expected to work within the boundaries and cater as much is needed to each of the affected parties.


Presenting the rationale, data, and solutions is a collaborative effort between all teams, and it is something within the industry that is not often seen as it is more of an internal metric. To keep organized with the company, JIRA and Atlassian was used as the main tool to report progress and keep everyone on the same page through each update and determine what deliverables were feasible for each upcoming quarter.

By adapting to an already existing platform of information, documentation made it so that there was more concise and left a paper trail for all levels of the company to view and understand the progress that was being made.


This was done in tangent with already pre-existing projects and ensured that scalability within the company was being thought of and put into motion as we continued to grow with the product and clientele.

Conclusions and Moving Forward


"I put my pictures down.

They're not as good as the real thing."

The misconception within many industries is that designers need to reinvent or fix a problem when that may or may not be the best route. One solution is simplifying the information or changing how it is presented to a user. Another one may be mapping out the demographic through User Personas and then conducting surveys to determine what sort of change can be enacted in the future. Whatever route is taken, very rarely does an overhaul of a design mean the entire system gets wiped out.


Understanding what users to target and how they understand and process information is critical to making informed choices within a design system. Getting a team and company to understand those values allows a more dynamic experience that is beneficial for both the users and the ones looking for said users.