Prototype flow · Full user journey
Enjin (a product under JAPI, a Tokyo nonprofit connecting international graduates with Japanese employers) ran three features on one platform: a job board (Career), a Q+A space (Forum), and a networking feed (Community). I joined in 2020 doing graphic and product design across the company. The original interface had been built by a previous designer. In 2023 I owned the full revamp alone.
I worked directly with the CTO, who also owned the product role, and the dev team reporting to him.
The site had users. It did not have active users. People signed up and did not come back to apply, post, or participate. Retention was low and no analytics existed to say exactly where people dropped off or why.
The brief was to find out why, with qualitative evidence as the only tool available.
Before · Original UI
After · Redesigned UI
I interviewed twenty current users, plus focus groups with five users and two non-users. Three patterns repeated. The word confused kept coming back. The three features stacked together felt overwhelming. Users could not say why they would pick Forum over Community.
When I asked which sites they actually used for job hunting, LinkedIn and GaijinPot dominated. For social, Facebook and Instagram. The shape of a familiar interface already lived in their heads. Ours did not match it.
Split the architecture, not the navigation
The pivotal call. Career, Forum, and Community served three different intents: goal-directed job hunting, Q+A browsing, and social networking. Stacking them in one navigation forced users to switch mental models on every screen, which is why confused kept coming back in interviews. I separated the three into distinct experiences and handed cross-service switching to the burger menu. Daily use became single-context. Moving between services became a deliberate action, not an accidental tab click.
Borrow patterns users already knew
Comfort comes from familiarity. I borrowed interface patterns from the two sites users already lived in: LinkedIn for the job browsing and profile flows, Facebook for the community feed. Less orientation time meant more time spent on the content itself.
Cut the visual noise
The original orange-green palette was the single most cited complaint in interviews. I replaced it with teal and off-black, added whitespace, and gave each service its own mark: a staircase for Career, an infinity loop with speech bubbles for Forum, a speech-bubble cube for Community. Users always knew which service they were in without needing a header to tell them.
Career logo
Forum logo
Community logo
Three distinct service experiences for Career, Forum, and Community, connected by a burger-menu switcher for cross-service moves. Mobile-first responsive layouts across all three. Three sub-brand marks and a unified type and color system. A component library covering every repeated pattern from button states to data tables. On the side: a product explainer animation (After Effects, own voiceover) and bilingual B2B brochures and event standees for the recruiting circuit.
Design file · Sign up · Registration · Landing page
The component library became engineering's source of truth and outlasted several team rotations. I do not have a quantitative lift to claim. Analytics were never added to measure before versus after.
Push harder for analytics from day one. Qualitative research set the right direction, but I never had numbers to show stakeholders a before-and-after. Every project since, tracking goes in during week one.
Enjin ceased operations in 2024. The founders relaunched under a new name in 2026. The market for bilingual professionals in Japan still has no dominant platform. The problem was real. The company ran out of runway.