How to Display Sections that Need to be Completed

Question

I'm sorry if the title is not clear. But basically I'm creating a website for people to apply for open jobs at our company. The requirements are that there are different sections a user must fill out such as Personal Info, Skills, Education etc. Right now, when a user logs in a panel is displayed that looks like this:

Each section is a link to information they'll need to fill out. Is there a way that I can show a user from this dashboard whether a section is 'complete' or not. For example, they've filled out the 'Personal' section but have not yet completed the 'Education' section. Would icons be best? Or different colors? Or checkmarks. I'm looking for some ideas on how best to communicate this. Perhaps I should just a do a progress bar?

Thanks for your input.

Answer 1

This time I'll try to generate some ideas first (sometimes it might be a good idea to spend 3 minutes with some useful tool).

Personally I like #6 -- it provides required information and provokes me to fill the profile. Please identify your goal: do you want to provide precise percentage or stimulate users to fill the whole profile?

I would say it is much better to stimulate users. Don't get me wrong, there is still a need to provide clear information, but in a slightly different way. So precise progress is not that crucial and this is the reason I'm a bit against a progress bar.

So let's try to make #6 a bit better:

You can also treat this issue as a gamification problem. From this point of view there are several reasons to have global score (global progress), but please note you will need to rethink the whole approach a bit. Because it is much better to tell user what he can do in order to increase his score rather than just show a status. Please see real example below:

70% looks like a puzzle to me. It just says: your profile is not finished, but available actions below the progress provide enough clues.

Finally, the simplest solution is the following: you have user profile nicely visualized, so just mark problematic sections in order to drive user's attention.

Answer 2

I would put a checkmark for each complete section. It is more stimulating to show positive impact. So I wouldn't mark sections as incomplete.

Over the Jobs title would be a nice spot for a progress area, claiming that you only need 2 of 7 sections to have a complete profile. Here I would show the other way round - showing how much is left. Because if you miss just 2 sections (one is for sure the upload process as it requires a already available resumee or a second visit) showing how less is left until completion, encourages a user to the little extra effort.