Internshala — App redesign

Solving user problems for one of my most utilized applications. A problem-oriented UX case study on Internshala app.

Background

I am a management student and a self-taught UX designer. I decided to learn UX to gain a new skill but got addicted. This is my first UX case study for an app that immensely helped me during this pandemic, Internshala.

This is a personal project. The tool I used during this project is Figma.

Why redesign?

I was having a discussion with my friends about what everyone did during the college break especially since the pandemic was declared and the college failed to provide us with internships. During the discussion, I mentioned how I got two really awesome internships from Internshala, to my surprise I got mixed responses from my friends about the Internshala app, some of them were about not finding the right internship but others were simply problems with the app. As I listened to them it forced me to self-audit the app for the problems.

I looked at the problems and I found myself saying.

“I see, yeah life would be better without these”

Thus, I chose to redesign Internshala

Disclaimer: This is not a complete app redesign but a problem-oriented case study in which I briefly discuss my thought process while solving the problems. I am not giving the UI an entirely fresh look, because while doing my research I found people praising the existing UI of app. Therefore I try to only solve user problems which I found through my research during this case study while also maintaining existing UI elements as much as possible.

Happy reading 😁

User Research

Methodology

I do not work at Internshala, so I do not have access to the user data to know the user behavior on the app. So, to conduct my own research, I began by reading app reviews on the Google Playstore, however, most of the recent reviews I found were very positive it is a 4.2 star rated app after-all, kudos to the Internshala team!. When I searched specifically for negative comments for the latest version of the app they were mostly either about fake internships/companies or poor internships/fresher jobs only, so to dig in deeper I used classic old User Interviews.

So the research methodologies I used were App Reviews & User Interviews

Screenshot of the negative Google Play reviews for Internshala

Problems

After reading Playstore reviews for the most recent version of the app and having 1:1 interviews with 10 different users of the app, I found some prevalent pain areas which when summarised are -

From Playstore review :

• Fraudulent companies
• Poor quality internships

From the User Interviews :

• Poor sorting and filtering of internships
• Too much scrolling
• Bound to use “one” in-app resume only
• No preset for applications (Need to type entire application again when applying for different profiles)

After analyzing the problems and going through the app I merged the problems which could be solved with some design changes.

So, here is the final problem statement alongside my approach to solving it. you can skip this and jump to solving problems where I mention these in more detail

• Fraudulent companies & Poor quality internships — — Designing feedback system and redesigning filter system to show companies based on rating
• Too much scrolling & Poor sorting and filtering of internships — — Adding filter by Freshness option to the existing filter system
• Bound to use “one” in-app resume only — — Designing multiple resume slots
• No preset for applications — — Allowing users to set default application text alongside a resume

Solving the problems.

Problem #1 Fraudulent companies & Poor quality internships

Research and Thought process

At first, I was surprised that so many people are encountering this problem, as my personal experience was highly positive. But so many people cannot be wrong right? the answer is well, only partly.

It is true Internshala does have some fraud internships, however, they are constantly putting effort to remove these. They also have a lot of internships from well-reputed companies such as Urban Company, Kotak, Decathlon, etc. and they clearly outweigh fraudulent internships

This bought me to the biggest question. If there are so many internships from such great companies then why are so many people experiencing poor internships?

And the only answer I could find after auditing the app is

The sorting system present in-app.

Why? Currently, Internshala sorts internships by date of posting by default. This could put even fraudulent internships on the front page and thus increasing the number of users applying for these and having a poor experience

So to fix this we need a better sorting system, but on what basis do we sort?

After analyzing all alternatives I found the best approach would be to allow users to review the company and then sort internships based on reviews. i.e design a feedback system.

My Approach

To solve this problem, I utilized a present in-app feature “Get Certificate.” 3 days after getting hired by a company Internshala allows users to download a certificate of selection and share it.

Here is how it currently looks.

Here is how it looks after adding a feedback system

Since the certificate is provided 3 days after getting hired, users should be able to rate the hiring process of the company quite accurately.

This allows us to further sort internships based on the rating given to the company by the users.

Here is how the current screen looks.

Here is how it looks after adding the new Sorting system.

Problem #2 Too much scrolling & Poor filtering of internships

Research and Thought process

As per the data I collected from user interviews 80% of users like to apply for internships that are a week old or more because from their experience they receive a response from employer sooner when compared to recently posted internships.

However, by default Internshala displays the most recently posted internships first

Why is this an issue? Since there is no pagination present in the application, users have to scroll for hours if they want to apply for Internships that have been posted on an older date

One way to solve this is to modify the sorting system we designed earlier to display old first but old internships are sometimes more than a month old and not in the sweet spot of 1 week which users prefer. Thus, by displaying old internships we would be making this existing system worse.

My Approach

To solve this problem I decided to add one more filter option called “Freshness” as in freshness of the internship, in the existing filter system.

This would give us options to filter the internships based on the date of posting.

Here is how it looked before :

Here is how it looks after adding one more filter option “Freshness”

Problem #3 Bound to use “one” in-app resume only & No preset for application

Research and Thought process

Currently, the Internshala app allows you to create a resume on their own app with an amazing flow, so you don’t have to spend hours to build it on a word processor. Awesome right? Except there is one problem, you can only create one resume.

Why is this an issue?, through my research on internshala users I know two things for sure, firstly users are mostly students, which is quite obvious but second insight is that, most users want to explore as many career possibilities as possible through internships before settling for a job, which means they tend to apply for internships of different categories.

Now you won’t want your resume for the title “Marketing Manager” to be the same as “Graphic Designer”, both require different skill sets to be mentioned in the resume.

For example here is how the resume of a student studying in management college and applying for internships in marketing and design both looks like as of now

Quite a mess right? and I have not even added internships, jobs, and projects. This proves the need for separate resumes for separate skill sets.

We will fix this but first coming to the problem of no preset applications

which as per the interviews I conducted was :

a major demotivator for students when applying for internships and a lot of them had preset text in other applications such as notes.

Currently, Internshala allows you to copy applications from your last application but the problem with this system is that often students customize their application based on the company and skills asked for, therefore often copying from the last application would not be the ideal solution.

So, users actually instead of utilizing this feature had preset text in third-party applications such as notes and would make minor adjustments in it and then paste it in the Internshala while applying for internships.

My Approach

The first thing I did was to design multiple resume slots to solve the problem of limited resume.

When I was done with the design, I realized an undeniable thing, that these resumes are only used to apply for internships, so it only makes sense to blend the preset application text with the resume.

Here is how the new Application & Resume screen looks so you get a better idea.

My goal with this redesign was to let users have this text in the Internshala app itself which they can customize as per their needs and blend this with multiple resume slots which also allows for multiple preset applications.

Thank you for reading it out 😁

Since this was my first case study, I would really appreciate it if you could send me some feedback on how I could have done better.