During Loyola's Coding Certificate program, one of our projects was to find any sort of pain point that can be solved through a website, with a week to finish the project. In order to conduct research on what problems people face everyday, my group project partner and I created a survey for our other classmates asking what kind of problems they see regularly. We separated the survey into two categories - work and social life with two questions for each category. For the work category we asked ‘are you currently looking for a job?’ and ‘which city are you looking for a job in?’. We found the most answered question was yes to ‘are you currently looking for a job?’ and the the city was New Orleans. So, based on these findings, we decided to create a database of tech jobs in New Orleans to resolve the issue of looking for jobs in New Orleans.
First, I looked at the common pain points in looking for a tech job in New Orleans, and I found that there was not a singular place for a candidate to look for only tech jobs in New Orleans. Users had to search for tech key words in other job boards.
Next, I storyboarded the workflow of candidates. Candidates and job posters are looking to do one or the either - find a job or post a job, so I decided the two actions should be a clear distinction. This is why on the home page, there are only two buttons, find or post.
When a user selects ‘find a job’ the job postings are in rounded cards with a uniform styling of logo, job name and link to apply. These cards are automatically generated through JavaScript 'On Page Load' functions and connected to the database. The user can search for different job position titles with the dynamic search bar function. The 'Nola Tech Find' title in the left corner is a button that can be used to bring the user back to the home page.
To post a job, I wanted to make this process as seamless as possible to encourage people to post jobs. Once the user fills out the information and hits submit, the information is stored in the database & the position can be seen in the 'view all openings' page.
For branding, since the website is centered around tech jobs, I decided to use clean, minimalistic, modern styling. So I used a sans-serif font because it is more modern than classic serifed fonts, black and white colors as to not confuse or distract the user with too many colors and rounded edges to welcome the user - rather than harsh corners.
The database was created through MySQL and uses AJAX & JQuery/Node.JS to call on the database. Ultimately, my group project partner and I created a functioning database with a front end view for users to easily find or post a tech job in New Orleans.
The app is deployed through Heroku and can be accessed here.
The github repo for this project can be viewed here.
