CONCEPT PROJECT
Career Carrot
Website Design
Overview
Have you ever gone through a career change?
If the answer is yes, you know the experience is not always pleasant. Hopefully, you had a good understanding of your strengths and skills and where to apply them next.
But what if you didn't?
What if the only thing you know for sure is that you are dissatisfied with your current role and want to change your career. Where do you start on this journey? This is the question we wanted to help our users answer.
Our team of three took on a challenge to help connect people with possible career paths.
MY ROLE
UX Designer
Research Lead
TEAM SIZE
Kendall Clark
(UI Lead)
Lena Yankina
Tina Huang
(Project Lead)
DURATION
2.5 weeks
TOOLS
Figma
MIRO
FigJam
Monday
Google Slides
STAGE 1: DISCOVER
Survey & User Interviews: understanding users’ behavior
and pain points
Through a pre-screening survey and personal networks, we recruited 16 interviewees. 13 of them had previous work experience and were looking for a career change. The other three were career coaches who gave us valuable insights into job seekers' needs.
During our interviews, we asked questions to understand what motivates people to change their careers, what challenges and pain points they encounter along the way, and what kind of assistance they need.
In our users’ words:
“Outside of bartending and playing music, I don’t know what my strengths and weaknesses are.”
“I can’t afford full-time classes, so I have to work in a field I’m not passionate about.”
"I was really looking for a mentor, someone who was already in the industry and knew what they were doing."
We used an affinity map to help us synthesize our primary research, and discovered some interesting trends.
Affinity Map of users’ responses
Findings
Career changers often don't know their strengths
Users are overwhelmed with information available on the subject and don't know where to start
Users want support through mentorship and career coaching
The majority of users hope to change a career within 12 months
Users don't have a strong preference between mobile device and desktop for a career search
Insights
Users need a platform where they can discover and learn about various career paths
Users need support and guidance in the form of mentorship and career coaching
Users want to be able to assess their skills and strengths so they can find a right career
Competitive Analysis: assessing current features and opportunities for improvement
As a part of the secondary research, we did a competitive analysis with some popular job search sites (CareerBuilder, Indeed, Glassdoor).
We wanted to see if any features would help users in a career-changing process.
Findings
The main focus of all sites is a SEARCH FEATURE for a particular job/company/keywords, assuming that users KNOW what they are looking for.
All sites have a section with tips on building a resume or cover letter in the form of an article. Indeed also has short videos on these topics. However, this critical information is not apparent and is often buried in the footer of a website.
None of the websites provide clear step-by-step guidance on HOW to make a career change.
STAGE 2: DEFINE
Problem Statement
Based on the conducted research, we came up with the following problem statement:
Users looking for a career change need
personalized guidance and various resources
to pursue dream careers confidently.
Our proposed solution is to create a platform where users can assess their strengths, get professional advice, and learn about various careers so they can make a transition within a year.
User Persona: creating user representation
based on our research
Before we moved on to sketching, we created a user persona. It helped us to stay focused and only consider features that might be useful to our users.
User Persona
STAGE 3: DEVELOP
Design Studio: sketching quick ideas to solve design problems
Once we narrowed the problem statement, we moved on to the ideation phase and ran a design studio. The goal was to create 6–8 concept sketches in a given time frame that helped Mark achieve his goals. Each presented idea was critiqued and voted on. The design studio helped us generate multiple ideas quickly and choose the ones worth taking forward in our design process.
Generating ideas through design studio
To help Mark transition to a new career, we wanted to focus on the following features:
Learning about potential careers and schools that offer related classes
Finding a mentor or career coach
Assessing skills and strengths
User Flows, Wireframes, and Usability Testing
User flow: learning about a potential career
Once we've established features that we'd like to work on, we started to create user flows and wireframes.
With a user flow, we were able to follow Mark in every step of his task, making sure that nothing was missed or skipped. Here, for instance, we have a flow of a user who is interested in a specific career and wants to learn more about it.
User flow diagrams gave us a good understanding of what wireframes we need to create. When choosing a device to design for, we kept three things in mind:
Users did not express a strong preference between a desktop and a mobile device
It is a well-known practice to start designing for a mobile device first because it's easier to scale up and create a desktop version from it
Time constraints for this project. Since it was a 2.5-week design sprint and the majority of the time was taken by our research, we wanted to make sure that we'll be able to deliver MVP and execute usability testing to validate our design on time
Here is an evolution of early paper sketches to mid-fidelity prototypes.
Homepage: sketch to mid-fidelity
Advisors page: sketch to mid-fidelity
Once the mid-fidelity prototype was completed, we conducted a usability test. With this test, we were trying to:
validate/reject the existing features of the website
gather insights about needed features
We recruited three participants and asked them to complete the following tasks:
Find out what schools are offering UX Design classes
Book a session with a mentor
Usability test findings
RESULTS
Overall, users were happy with the idea of the platform and the features it offered. All users were able to complete the requested tasks. Here are some findings from usability tests:
The Hero message on the Homepage didn't provide enough clarity on the website's objective and functionality
Users wanted to see more career options that are grouped into topics
Users wanted to customize search results through various filters when browsing Classes or Advisors
STAGE 4: DELIVER
High-fidelity prototype
We've integrated feedback from usability testing and moved on to the high-fidelity prototype.
Career changing process seemed daunting and overwhelming for our users. However, with the visual design of the website, we wanted to make it seem more approachable and fun. By using orange as a primary color and incorporating illustrations, we wanted our website to feel optimistic, friendly, and encouraging.
Integrating users’ feedback: Homepage
Integrating users’ feedback: Career Paths page
Integrating users’ feedback: Classes page
Prototype
Next Steps
Create a comprehensive skill assessment test that would match user's results with available careers
Look into additional helpful features, such as "Chatbot" that could immediately assist users with any questions
Develop a desktop version of the website
My Takeaway
I was introduced to the design studio for the first time during this project.
I was amazed at how helpful it was, considering our time constraints. We were able to generate many ideas, vote for the best of them, and quickly move on to the next stage of our design process.
This method also taught me not to get too attached to any of my particular ideas but rather to keep an open mind and jointly come up with the best solution for our users.