U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Hiring Our Heroes
A website to help veterans and military families navigate their transition home
Background
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Hiring Our Heroes (HOH) initiative launched in March 2011 as a nationwide effort to connect veterans, service members, and military spouses with meaningful employment opportunities. Leveraging the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s vast network of strategic partners from the public, private, and non-profit sectors, we partnered with Hiring Our Heroes to create a website with streamlined user experience, easy-to-access resources, and clear pathways to help veterans and military families define the next step in their lives.
Challenges
- Designing a cohesive, personalized experience for five distinct personas
- Creating clear user paths and content funnels for a massive library of resources
- Presenting a consistent brand identity across digital properties, physical collateral, and brick-and-mortar events
Establishing benchmarks through competitor analysis and UX reviews
After understanding the organization’s existing challenges, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of the usability, information architecture, navigation, imagery, and message of the websites of five key competitors. This allowed us to help Hiring Our Heroes establish its differentiation and uncover opportunities to better serve its user base.
We also spent time analyzing the existing digital properties of Hiring Our Heroes to identify their challenges with navigation, the difficulty of use, and the need for more guidance to essential resources. Conducting these exercises ensured we could present objective findings, offer concrete recommendations, and build consensus around the ideal path for design and development.
Building customized user flows for five core personas
A central challenge was planning for the breadth of the Hiring Our Heros user base and individual user needs at different stages of the transition from military to civilian life.
- Veterans navigating the process of finding and securing employment
- Active service members planning for their transition to civilian life
- Military and veteran spouses seeking work and assisting their spouse in finding employment
- Employers looking for guidance on how to hire and continually support veterans
- Partners and sponsors interested in engaging with the Hiring Our Heroes organization
Telling the Hiring Our Heroes story
In addition to creating a technically optimized, user-centric website, it was important to recognize how crowded the market was with organizations seeking to provide transitional assistance to veterans and military families.
Hiring Our Heroes had dozens of examples of helping families move stateside and successfully settle into civilian life. These success stories were possible due to the organization’s logical, sustainable, and step-by-step approach to helping users identify the best events to attend, create a world-class resume, know which fellowships to apply for, and much more.
We worked closely with HoH’s leadership, communications, and programs teams to understand what made them the best in their business, then strategized ways to communicate a compelling visual story through elements like headlines, images, and resources.
Delivering on the vision of a mission-driven organization
The end result of our engagement with Hiring Our Heroes was a website that creates a bridge between the military community and a vast network of strategic partners from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors interested.
Working in tandem with Hiring Our Heroes leadership in the design and development phases, and leveraging their extensive knowledge of how to help veterans and military families transition home successfully, was vital.
