IranTalent.com had been publishing an annual employee-salary report for five years as a free PDF — comprehensive, but hard to query and easy to lose. Leadership wanted to turn that report into an online product that paid for itself. I joined as the only designer and, for the first two months, the only person on the project at all.
Dec 2017 — Sep 2018
IranTalent.com · IranSalary
Sole designer + frontend developer (first 2 months)
Sketch · Zeplin
HTML · CSS · Angular
500+ daily page views · 40% complaint reduction
The 5-year salary survey was treated as a cost line — distributed for free, no recurring revenue. Leadership wanted IranSalary as the productized version: employees check fair pay; employers benchmark offers; the company finally captures revenue from work it was already doing. Aggressive 2-month deadline for the first phase. No engineering team yet.
I designed and implemented the entire first phase in HTML, CSS, and Angular. There was no developer on the project for the first two months, and shipping the launch on time depended on the same person doing both jobs.
Not "designer who once dabbled in code" — sole designer-and-developer of a live Angular product hitting 500+ daily views from launch. After the launch, I handed the codebase over to a backend-focused engineer and stayed on as UX Designer for the employee and employer phases.
Why this matters for the rebrand: the designer-plus-developer combination isn't a 2024 invention. It's been my actual shape since 2017.
Three phases (early launch with basic features → employee section → employer section), tightly time-boxed. Inside each phase: ~10 stakeholder and user interviews; competitive analysis against Glassdoor, PayScale, Indeed, and CareerExplorer; brainstorming with the product owner against a lean-canvas business hypothesis; sitemap and information architecture; sketching → wireframes → high-fidelity in Sketch; click-through prototype; ~15 usability testing sessions to refine before each release.
Two visual-design directions in parallel — one more creative, one closer to the existing IranTalent brand. We shipped the simpler one and kept the alternate as the basis for later iteration.
We installed Hotjar at launch and watched session recordings, heatmaps, and funnels daily. Iterations were data-driven: features and navigation refined where users hesitated, dropped off, or clicked unexpected things. Within six months, complaint volume had dropped by 40%.
If I were rebuilding IranSalary today, here's where I'd lean on AI:
