Who is Climatebase?
With over 25,000 jobs posted in just the last year from organizations across virtually every climate sector, Climatebase is the world’s leading climate careers platform. Nearly half a million people have used their job board to find climate jobs. Climatebase’s vast network of climate tech companies and environmental nonprofits led them to a new opportunity...
Our Project
The Climatebase team had identified an opportunity. If they could enable climate content creators to offer a job board, employers would pay for listings in order to reach that creator’s audience. It’s a monetization opportunity for creators and Climatebase, and access to new talent for employers. A win-win-win.
Climatebase is small team that was simultaneously rebuilding their core app. They brought us on to build an MVP to test this idea quickly.
Define The Flow
Early on, two main UX challenges emerged.
- How can we best manage the hand-off between all the brands involved? From a job applicant’s perspective, it should feel cohesive clicking from a creator’s newsletter into a Climatebase-hosted job board and then into an employer’s job listing. From an employer’s perspective, we need to earn their trust when they try to post on a creator’s job board but need to first make a Climatebase account, then pay for a token via Stripe, and then arrive back at the creator’s board to post a job.
- How do job tokens work? How does someone buy a token? Does that job post also show up in Climatebase? Can someone post a job to a creator’s board from the Climatebase core board?
To tackle these challenges, we showed multiple lo-fi diagrams and talked through the details of each part of the flow. This made it easier for the Climatebase team to share opinions and think through the technical implications of different solutions.
"We really appreciated that you started with flow charts and diagrams... it got us to functional designs quickly. It felt like we were really collaborating in coming up with solutions." –Justin Hardin, CTO @ Climatebase
Get Into The Code
We worked within their existing code base and with their engineers. This required some time to understand how the code and processes fit together.
We did the front-end work. One of the key decisions was how to style components. Instead of using our standard UI kit, we augmented their existing bespoke component library. This keeps the codebase smaller, and makes it easier for their team to maintain in the future.
We knew their team was strapped for time. So we wrote an API definitions document that mocked up what was needed from the back end. This enabled their engineers to quickly write what was needed as easily as possible.
Results
They were able to spin out a prototype with minimal effort from their internal team. One of the best things about working with Climatebase is that they already had beta customers asking to use their product. So it was very motivating to work on and know that our work would immediately be put to good use.
