I've been running CareerAutomata for a while now — a tool that lets job seekers search directly from company ATS systems instead of job boards. The core product worked. The UI did not.
The Problem
The old layout tried to do too much at once. Wide job cards, cluttered navigation, a Career Hub that had a Kanban board nobody could actually use. Users were landing, scanning for two seconds, and leaving. Not because the data wasn't there — it was — but because reading it felt like work.
What I Built
A full UI rebuild focused on one thing: making jobs easy to scan.
The job listing view is now a narrower two-column layout. Tighter cards, more jobs visible without scrolling, less visual noise per card. The information hierarchy is cleaner — company name, role, and ATS source are immediately readable.
Navigation got compressed into a concise top bar. No more hunting for where things are.
The Career Hub is the part I'm now happy with. The Kanban board was technically there before but practically unusable — columns were misaligned, drag-and-drop was unreliable, cards were too wide. It's now actually functional. You can track applications from applied to offer without fighting the interface. And you can now drop (not just archive) the cards.
And Automatic job pruning is back! Cleaner DB and faster search as a result. Now up to 670 companies and counting.
What I Learned
Most UI problems aren't about missing features. They're about information density and visual hierarchy. The job data didn't change — just how it's presented. Scan time dropped noticeably in my own testing.
What's Next
SEO improvements and a proper landing page rewrite are next. The tool finds jobs humans miss. More people need to know it exists. The more people use it, the more it learns about success patterns and shares them with users. All automatically. All FREE.
What's the one thing that makes you abandon a job search tool immediately?
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