Making Salary Data Easier to Compare
Product Design / Data Visualization
Redesigned JobVision's Annual Salary Report across four annual editions (2021–2024), improving how readers navigate and compare salary data while making recurring updates easier to maintain.
Team
Moein Saboohi
Senior Designer
Paniz Ezzati
Graphic Designer
Mahdi Kazemi
Data Storyteller
Fatemeh Mianabadi
Business Analyst
Saeed Akbari
Campaign Manager
Duration
April 2021 – December 2024
3 years and 8 months
Softwares
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
Figma
FigJam
Microsoft Excel
Overview
Across four annual editions at JobVision, I designed and iterated on the Annual Salary Report. The core challenge was helping readers find the right comparison and understand a salary range across more than 75 job categories, four seniority levels and multiple regions.
I worked with a graphic designer, data storyteller, business analyst and campaign manager. My contribution covered report structure, visual hierarchy, chart presentation and reusable page layouts. The reporting team supplied and interpreted the survey data; the design work made that information easier to navigate and maintain.
The JobVision Annual Salary Report and its visual presentation.
Two problems: reading the data and producing the report
Job seekers wanted a reference for salary expectations. HR teams and employers needed comparisons for their hiring decisions. A single market average was not enough: readers had to match a job category, seniority level and region before interpreting current and desired salaries.
Readers needed a comparison that matched their role, seniority, and region before interpreting a salary range.
The production team faced a related constraint. Detailed pages had to be updated every year across a large set of categories. The report needed a repeatable structure that could carry more data without turning each release into a manual redesign.
The report production workflow, including data, design and recurring updates.
Organizing around the reader’s comparison
I used audience profiles and journey mapping to define what readers were trying to find. Job seekers needed help interpreting the charts; HR readers were more comfortable with the visualizations but wanted greater job-specific depth.
Audience profiles used to distinguish salary lookup from employer benchmarking.
We grouped geographic comparisons into the capital, major cities and smaller cities. This reduced repeated navigation and gave readers a consistent route to relevant data. The grouping was a navigation decision, not a claim that salaries within each region were identical.
Journey mapping used to identify where readers find, compare and interpret salary information.
References for presenting salary information
I reviewed salary resources for three patterns: narrowing a comparison by role and location, explaining the range alongside the estimate, and showing changes over time. Those patterns informed the report’s organization and chart explanations. Interactive salary tools provided references, while the annual report still had to work as a readable publication.
Glassdoor Salary Insights
Role and location were useful starting filters for a salary comparison. The report needed to make those dimensions easy to locate before readers interpreted a range.
Payscale’s Salary Report
I considered how a salary estimate is explained through its inputs and range. This informed the need for chart guidance alongside the data, especially for readers unfamiliar with salary distributions.
Indeed Salary Trends
Trend views offered a reference for separating a current salary comparison from change over time. That distinction became more relevant as the report added job-specific growth and inflation context.
Making a large report navigable
I organized the content into three layers: an introduction and methodology guide, an overview of market statistics, and a salary magazine with detailed job-category pages. This separated a reader’s first explanation of the data from the repeated task of finding a specific comparison.
The content map separating guidance, market context and job-specific detail.
The reader flow for locating and comparing relevant salary information.
Choosing charts for different questions
We explored box plots for salary distributions, bar and line charts for comparisons and change over time, and bubble charts for the relationship between income and available positions. The chart choice had to follow the reader’s question, not the amount of data we could fit on a page.
Wireframes let us review chart placement, navigation and hierarchy before adding the final visual treatment. The images below show that exploration and its development into more detailed layouts.
Early page and chart structure explorations.
Alternative layout arrangements for the report.
Low-fidelity layouts for reviewing the hierarchy of salary information.
Further layout exploration before the final visual treatment.
Detailed report layouts with the chosen visual hierarchy and chart presentation.
What the evaluation exposed
We used interviews, usability tasks and a survey with more than 20 participants across job seekers, HR managers and other professionals. Tasks included finding a salary range, exploring trends and comparing job categories.
Interviews and surveys used to evaluate navigation and chart comprehension.
The evaluation reported correct chart interpretation among 75% of HR managers and 60% of job seekers. A quarter of users needed additional help with visualizations such as bubble charts. Finding salary information took an average of 65 seconds, with 70% completing the task in under 90 seconds. The evaluation reported satisfaction at 72%; feedback still raised concerns about layouts and chart clarity.
These figures are evaluation results, not a before-and-after improvement or a representative estimate for all JobVision users. The different comprehension rates were particularly useful: we could not assume that a chart understood by an HR specialist would explain itself to a job seeker.
Different chart comprehension rates showed that guidance had to work for job seekers as well as HR specialists.
Adding guidance while preserving depth
Feedback on the 2022 edition pointed to two needs. Employers wanted more detailed information; job seekers needed help reading it. For the 2023 report, we retained the core structure, expanded specialist insights and added guides across the report.
A guide page explaining how to read and use the report.
For the 2024 edition, readers asked for more information within their own job category. We redesigned the salary magazine to include additional comparisons, including salary growth over time and its relationship to inflation. Layout and chart explorations helped us fit that detail into a repeatable page structure.
Iteration of the job-category pages as the report gained more detailed comparisons.
Further development of the salary magazine’s page structure.
Meeting the release deadline
The more detailed page design made manual production across every job category impractical. We discussed automated page generation with the technical team, but the full solution could not be delivered before the release deadline.
I worked with the report team on an interim production workflow using Excel data and the existing design structure. This supported page production for that edition; the longer-term automated generation solution remained separate. That let us publish the 2024 edition with the added detail while leaving the longer-term technical solution for later. The trade-off was to support that release with a temporary production method rather than reduce the reader-facing information.
We used an interim production workflow to meet the release deadline while preserving the added job-specific detail.
Outcome and scope
The work produced an evolving annual report with clearer guidance, more job-specific detail and a more repeatable production structure. The test findings still showed room to improve chart comprehension, particularly for job seekers.
JobVision also made salary information available through a salary calculator and a job magazine. They extended access to the data beyond the report; this case focuses on my report design and production work.
JobVision Salary Calculator (Persian)
JobVision Job Magazine (Persian)
The gallery below shows pages from the 2024 edition.
