Client
Olympia
Background
Recruitment websites serve a wide audience. Olympia's is skewed toward blue collar and vocational job seekers, a group routinely underserved by digital platforms that assume a level of literacy or tech confidence they may not have. The site had to convert, and it had to work for people the category usually designs past.
Approach
Accessibility is normally argued as compliance, which is why it loses to conversion. Here it was the same argument. If our target audience cannot read or digest a page easily, they will not apply. Read-aloud buttons and map and list toggles for vacancies were questioned as out of scope. Framing them as conversion levers, backed by usage data from comparable platforms, got both into the final build. I took both back to development and to the client and reframed them as conversion levers, backed by usage data from comparable platforms. Both made the final build. Early feasibility conversations with development shaped which directions were worth refining, and more complex flows were scoped out before they got too far, which kept the project moving. Holding a system across 36 templates meant every decision had to survive being repeated dozens of times, which is a different discipline to designing a page.
Outcome
Olympia now has one system holding 36 templates, where accessibility is built into the components rather than bolted onto the pages. The brand reaches an audience the category routinely designs past, and does it without a separate stripped-back version, which means there is one Olympia rather than a main site and an accessible afterthought.
