Project Context
Goal: To design a platform that provides career-minded individuals with a tool to help them plot a course for the career of their dreams. The goal was to eliminate barriers that prevent individuals from pursuing jobs that interest them and help them explore the pathways they can take while planning their new careers.
Outcome: A platform that provides users with a platform to build an informed and supportive community to guide them through their careers by finding commonalities and interests. Usability studies showed positive feedback from users and peers in the industry, with 80% of users expressing that this app would solve their career struggles.
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Timeline
3 Weeks (April 19th - May 5th)
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My Role
UX Researcher and Interaction Designer
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My Contributions
Screener Survey, Comparative analysis, Research plan, User interviews, Design studio, Test plan, Usability testing, Prototype Refining
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Tools Used
Miro, Adobe Illustrator, Marvel app, Figma, Canva, Google Suite
User Research
The first phase of this project was research, which lasted about 1 and a half weeks.
Research Goal: To find out how people plan their careers and find any pain points they encounter in this process.
Target Audience: People who are just starting a new career or recently changed careers
Research Methods: Screener survey, User interviews, and Competitive and Comparative Analysis
User Interviews
I created a survey to get a diverse pool of participants for our research. With the survey, we mainly wanted to ensure that we recruited both people who were currently exploring careers or had recently made a career change.
We recruited 19 participants for our user interviews: seven who were career changers, five who are currently working professionals, three who were currently in college, and four who are still looking for their ideal careers.
The following quotes demonstrate a few of the interview insights that helped us conclude that community support is essential while planning careers.
“I want to hear about someone's experience that can resonate with me - that can give me the reassurance I need to move forward.”
“I want to talk to people who were once as confused as me once and then figured it out.”
“I was on my own to figure out what I wanted to do with my career. I decided to do it without learning much about it.”
Affinity Mapping
I set up a collaborative Miro board to arrange the insights from our interviews into individual post-its. Once we were done interviewing, I led an affinity mapping session to map similarities between post-its. We summarized our insights into several “I” statements, sorted into categories to better organize. The graphic below is the final result.
The interviews provided so much valuable information that we had more insights than expected. Sorting into categories helped us sort through all the information we received.
Based on the number of insights and recurrent themes we observed in our user interviews, we focused on the 'Career Influences' category as the most important category. This also seemed to be the area most career platforms we explored in our Market Research (explained in detail in a later section) were lacking.
User Persona
We synthesized all the user interview data from our affinity map into the user persona below. Meet Pragmatic Pat; she, like most of our users, is looking for a sense of community while career-seeking to feel confident and secure in her new career change.
Market Research
Alongside the user research, we also put together a list of possible platforms we could examine as competitors and gathered some preliminary information on what services the competitors provided to career seekers.
We then narrowed it down to three direct and three indirect competitors and conducted a feature inventory, shown in the visual below.
Our research showed that the most successful career platforms had a community feature or mentorship. We also realized that most competitors provided various career resources, but few provide access to specialized community support. This is where we wanted to stand out.
Consequently, the comparative platforms we included in our feature inventory were all community-focused to get a sense of features to include in our final product.
Define
Problem Statement
At the end of our research week, we arrived at this problem statement that connected all the major points we felt were relevant.
People need access to a diverse and informed community during critical states in their career path so they can feel secure, informed, and empowered to make career choices.
How Can We…
Specifically, we wanted to discover how can we:
…empower users to be confident in their own career choices
…provide effective mentorship and community support
…reassure the users that the career change they make will be fulfilling
Ideate
Sketching
From our research phase, we concluded that most of the users seemed to want a sense of community that would help them with their journey to discovering their careers. But the challenge was presenting the community feature in the most accessible way to provide the most use to our users.
Onboarding screen 1
Main Homepage
Onboarding screen 2
Community Homepage
We had two design studio sessions to come up with ideas. We focused on generating ideas for the general user flow during the first and finalizing our ideas during the second.
For the final user flow, we agreed that an onboarding quiz would place users into specific communities based on their interests and preferences. Once complete, the user could view a homepage with feeds from the different communities they were a part of, join a community, and access events, resources, and mentors from that community.
This was the first-ever design studio any of us had participated in, so we had difficulty choosing a final user flow from our sketches because we all had different ideas on what was important. We spent hours deliberating during the first session. Returning after a day allowed us to gain some clarity on the direction of our product.
Deciding on Mobile
After some discussion, we also realized that a mobile app would be most optimal for the community aspect of our idea. Based on our business research, competitors with mobile apps were more prevalent among users.
These sketches show the home and community screens from our finalized mobile wire flow.
Branding
To decide on the branding of our product, we started by creating a mood board with graphics and colors based on our project’s central theme: to empower, inform and secure individuals on the hunt for their dream careers.
We went with a muted yet colorful interface for the final style guide, choosing blue for security, yellow for optimism, and orange for encouragement. The main font is an easily readable sans-serif font to make the, at times, information-dense aspect of researching careers easier to digest.
Lastly, we wanted to use animated characters to add an element of fun. Still, to avoid distracting from the primary goal of our application, we made them simple humanoid graphics with varying skin tones for diversity.
Prototype
Wireframes & Initial testing
Before arriving at our final wireframes, I tested the usability of our sketches by animating the user flow using Marvelapp.
These tests gave me insights into which aspects of our sketches were working and which ones we needed to change before proceeding to the prototype.
After I reported my findings to the team, we added or changed elements that would help users better navigate our app, such as labels to the navigation bar icons, and moving the profile icon to the top right corner.
Loading Screen
Home Screen
Community Page
I conducted further usability testing on the Figma prototype once the interactions were prototyped. The results can be seen in the following sections.
Prototype Walkthrough
The video below shows a walkthrough of our final prototype.
Test
Usability Testing
During the project's last week, I tested and refined the prototype with the following test plan.
Test Plan
Goal: Have users comfortably navigate the app without confusion and reach the end of the flow in 5 mins or less.
Tasks:
Sign up for the app as a new user and join some communities
Find and read a post (How I entered tech) from the ‘Women in Tech’ community
Find a potential mentor (Jessa Del) and message them
Find a place to ask a question
Results
These are the changes we made based on observations from the usability testing, which are seen in the final prototype.
Adding UX copy that gave more instruction to users on how to move forward during onboarding.
2. Adding the back button to certain pages to make navigating back to the previous page easier.
3. Giving an easier way for users to identify which members of the community were mentors.
4. Making the Link to posts more intuitive by underlining them.
Conclusion
Next Steps
If I were to take this project further, these are the next steps I would take:
To provide the ability to invite and add contacts during onboarding (API)
To capture KPIs on sign-ups, user engagement, and satisfaction.
To flesh out all the features – community events, resources, meetings with mentors
To design and develop a web app
Retrospective
Working on this project was a great experience in collaborative design, combining ideas from different designers to create the most optimal user experience for a product. A topic as vast as career exploration could have gone in many different paths, the one we chose only being one. Ultimately, relying on the research was a key factor in making the project successful despite the difficulties we faced.