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SEEK · Principal product designer · Shipped in 2025

Putting useful jobs where people already look

SEEK’s mobile app split discovery between Home and a Recommendations tab. Home supported search. Recommendations held the personalised jobs.

Only 20% of users opened that second tab. Most people never reached the content that was meant to make their experience more relevant.

I led the redesign that brought recommendations into a single Career Feed on Home. The team’s work lifted application starts per unique visitor by 31%.

Change the structure

We could have tried to draw more attention to the Recommendations tab. It already had a red notification badge, and four in five users still didn’t visit.

We brought the recommendations to Home instead. That changed the job of the page: it needed to support a deliberate search and make room for discovery during the same visit.

I worked with product, research, personalisation and native mobile engineers on the navigation and information architecture. The key decision was where personalised content belonged. The screen design followed from that.

SearchFind a role
RecommendationsPersonalised roles

Search and personalised recommendations start in separate places.

A schematic of the design decision. The original before-and-after image appears separately in the story.

Before and after comparison of the Career Feed navigation
The original before-and-after comparison.

Make the feed feel manageable

A feed also needs to help people understand what they’re looking at and what they can do next.

We added an All/New control for recommendations. It gave people a direct way to find fresh jobs. Saved and recent searches moved into the search component, keeping their utility while creating more room in the feed.

Usability feedback brought details back into focus, including badges and a way to return to the top after a long scroll. The job cards also needed to accommodate useful signals such as an expiring role without requiring another change to the page structure.

Constructed interaction example

Job feed controls

Recommended roles

A small sample list

4 jobsAll recommendations

  • Service designerNew

    Northbank Studio · Melbourne · Hybrid

  • Product designer

    Fieldwork · Melbourne · Flexible

  • Experience strategistNew

    Common Ground · Remote · Australia

  • Design researcher

    Goodside · Sydney · Hybrid

Invented roles and organisations. This does not represent live SEEK results or the historical experiment.

One experience, native details

The design needed to hold together across iOS and Android. That meant working through the behaviour as well as the visuals: controls, navigation, scrolling and the states someone encounters while looking for work.

Much of the work was daily collaboration through technical blockers, usability feedback and the existing structure of the apps. My contribution was to keep the product decision and intended experience clear as those details were resolved with the team.

What changed

The reported outcomes were a 31% lift in application starts per unique visitor and a 26% lift in engagement per visitor.

Application starts matter here because they describe a step someone took after discovery. I keep that measure distinct from completed applications and placements: it shows progress towards applying, rather than the whole outcome of a job search.

These were team outcomes. Bringing recommendations into Home was the central design decision within a larger redesign and delivery effort; the results don’t isolate the contribution of a single control or component.

What I took from the work is a question I now ask earlier: where will someone encounter the value we’re creating? The answer can change the product more than another feature inside it.