Overview
My Role:
Lead Product Designer
Context:
After EchoStar and DISH merged at the end of 2023, their careers journeys were fragmented and difficult to navigate. Candidates were forced to navigate across multiple domains with inconsistent navigation and content structures, creating confusion and weakening the employer brand.
As the sole product designer on the echostar.com team, I owned the end-to-end redesign of the careers experience, using research to improve and align careers content across DISH and EchoStar.
Tools Used:
Figma, Figjam, UserZoom, Adobe Experience Manager
The Team:
Product Design & Research
Product Management
Talent Acquisition
The Challenge
Inconsistent brand presence: Hughes, EchoStar’s flagship brand prior to the merger, had no dedicated careers site. Separately, DISH’s career site did not align with the new EchoStar corporate brand.
Fragmented candidate experience: Hughes and DISH had separate applicant tracking systems and disconnected entry points, resulting in inconsistent paths to job discovery and application.
Unclear navigation: The existing structure on DISH’s careers site reflected internal systems rather than candidate goals, making it difficult for users to find the information they needed.
Research & Discovery
To inform the redesign, we performed research focused on how job seekers search for roles, prioritize information, and their existing mental models of careers content.
Job Seeker Survey
We began with a quantitative survey of 100 external job seekers to understand what information candidates value most when exploring a company’s careers site. Results showed that candidates consistently prioritized practical information such as benefits, application status, and hiring details, over promotional content such as social media links, awards, and testimonials.
Summary of survey results
Card Sorting
To understand how candidates expected information to be organized, we ran a card sorting exercise with external candidates that revealed two dominant mental models: finding and applying for roles, and company context. This informed how careers content should be grouped and organized across pages.
Summary of card sorting results
Tree testing
Lastly, we conducted tree testing across multiple information architecture iterations to evaluate content discoverability. Early versions revealed friction finding information around benefits and the hiring process. A final tree test of the revised, data-informed hierarchy showed improved task success and validated the navigation structure.
Tree testing results
Moving into Design
Together, this research established clear direction for design decisions around navigation and content organization.
Design Approach
The Talent Acquisition team shared initial content and a sitemap based on their operational needs, which I used as a starting point alongside research findings. My role was to synthesize this input with research and translate it into a candidate-first experience.
Using the research results, I restructured the information architecture to prioritize practical, job-related information and simplify the navigation. I built high-fidelity designs across over 15 pages using echostar.com’s component library to ensure consistency with the broader site and support long-term scalability within Adobe Experience Manager.
Legacy, proposed, and final content structure outline
The Solution
The final experience consolidates all careers content across brands into a unified experience at echostar.com/careers. The navigation is intentionally simple, with job searching as the clear starting point and supporting content organized around candidate expectations.
Unifies the post-merger careers experience
Makes job discovery immediate and intuitive
Integrates seamlessly with the now consolidated job searching and applicant tracking system experience on jobs.echostar.com
Scales through reusable page templates and components across Adobe Experience Manager and Figma
Results & Impact
The redesigned careers experience delivered measurable improvements in traffic, engagement, and usability following launch:
The careers landing page (echostar.com/careers) moved from the site’s 3rd-ranked page in Q1 to #1 in Q3, increasing from 2.2k to 98.5k views (+249.3% quarter-over-quarter)
302.9% increase in unique visitors
Nearly 2× increase in time on site, from ~1 minute to ~2 minutes
Job-finding task success increased from 22% to 80% in post-launch usability testing