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UX review: employer job form & job detail page

The review in one sentence: we walked the employer job form and the marketplace job detail page through Jesse James Garrett's five planes of user experience — from business strategy down to pixels — and found that both screens have a solid structure but keep failing their users at the feedback layer: the places where the product should tell people what is happening stay silent or show broken output.

What this document set is

This is the full UX review Ali asked for alongside the job-category redesign (job category taxonomy, jodapp-api#1840). It was written on 2026-07-10, after the category picker shipped (PR jodapp-web#1311) and after the Jod Design System went live on claude.ai/design. It exists so that:

  • anyone redesigning these screens starts from a shared, evidence-based picture, not from taste;
  • every recommendation can be prototyped in Claude Design with our real components;
  • the fixes have owners and an order (see the roadmap page).

What we reviewed​

SurfaceWho uses itReference
Employer job form (/employers/careers/jobs/create)Employer ops managers posting jobs (F&B, retail, logistics; often non-native English readers)screenshot, reviewed page by page in Employer job form
Job detail page (/jobs/:company/:slug)Job seekers on mobile deciding whether to applyscreenshot, reviewed in Job detail page

The method — what the five planes are and why we chose this model — is explained in Method: the five planes.

The shortlist (read this if you read nothing else)​

  1. The feedback layer is broken in four places, and all four are already ticketed under jodapp-web#1318: the over-limit character count never turns red, checkbox validation messages never display, one-sided pay ranges render $NaN, and the form's own preview can print undefined as a pay period. These are small fixes with outsized trust impact — they ship first.
  2. The job detail page shows employers' raw typing habits to every seeker. Requirements and benefits render with double bullets (• -Minimum 1 year...) because employers type dashes and we add bullet markers on top. Multiple outlet addresses concatenate into one unreadable line. Both are render-side normalisation fixes — we do not need to re-educate employers.
  3. The structure is mostly right — do not rebuild it. Essentials-first hierarchy on the detail page, live previews on the form, and the new fully-visible category picker are all correct decisions by the five-plane model. The redesign effort should go into the skeleton and surface, not into new page structures.
  4. The Apply action has one chance per page. On a long job description there is no second Apply and no sticky action bar; the ad unit also sits directly above the only Apply button. This is the highest-value structure experiment to prototype in Claude Design.

How this connects to the rest of 2026 work​

  • The category picker change reviewed here is the first shipped piece of the job category taxonomy initiative.
  • Every "prototype" recommendation maps to real components in the Jod Design System (claude.ai/design project, synced from jodapp-web — see PR jodapp-web#1313). Designs made there are made of the components we actually ship.
  • The marketplace-side structure questions feed the broader information architecture plan.