A service of The Chronicle of Higher Education, ChronicleVitae is the only online professional network designed and built specifically for professionals in higher education.
Beginning mid-2012, I led The Chronicle in its first large-scale user study, focused on identifying opportunities and direction for the future of the recruitment advertising business. Subsequently, I was responsible for UX strategy and design direction, as we partnered with Viget to design and develop a new product, based on the concepts of professional networking and passive recruiting, culminating in the launch of ChronicleVitae.com in October, 2013. Not quite 4 years later, over 880,000 higher-ed professionals have joined Vitae, driving just over 1 million visits, and 4 million pageviews per month on average.
The work that follows is a combination of my own design output and work produced through projects I led, by researchers at Cooper, designers at Viget and The Chronicle's in-house UX and Marketing Communications teams.
We began by partnering with Cooper to conduct a user ecology study, and gain a deeper understanding of how professionals in higher ed find jobs, manage their careers, and recruit talent. Working with Cooper, we conducted nearly 70 one-on-one contextual interviews with faculty and administrators at 13 institutions. The institutions we visited were chosen to represent as broad a sample as possible across a series of characteristics: large vs. small, public vs. private, research- vs. teaching-focused, and rural vs urban.
The scenarios and personas that resulted from the study were used in a series of ideation exercises to explore and prioritize business opportunities, and eventually to design and develop our version of a professional network that's unique to the needs of The Chronicle's audience.
ChronicleVitae was built on four key pillars: First, member profiles and community services for professional networking; second, critical news, career advice, and resources from the most trusted and credible publisher in higher education; third, career advice from The Chronicle and resources like webinars, university profile pages, and a crowd-sourced syllabi database; and last, an essential job board of the most sought after positions in higher ed, including a free dossier service and direct integration with the two of the largest applicant tracking systems in the higher-ed space.
Vitae member profiles feature a drag and drop layout, that allows for a wide range of customization, while still maintaining a standardized set of profile sections and user data. As a result, members have the flexibility to tell the story of their career their own way, but a sense of continuity and consistency is maintained as a visitor navigates from one user's profile to the next.
ChronicleVitae offers news & career advice written both by The Chronicle's staff writers, and by "Vitae Voices" -- working professionals and thought leaders in higher education.
The logged in member homepage serves as a "dashboard", aggregating notifications, editorial content, updates on activity in your network, and personalized recommendations for new connections and jobs.
Vitae was designed to be fully responsive from launch, so that even critical tasks like performing a job search can be accomplished effectively on a mobile device.
