Objective: Smarter career-learning tools for teens
In my role as Product Manager and Instructional Designer, my founding team and I created enScholar, a mobile-friendly career app for active teens. With short videos and modular activities, we help students define and reflect on their interests, strengths, and values, and provide a system for practicing and applying critical thinking. We’ve made everything free for career seekers of all ages.
“enScholar was extremely useful for me to have a much deeper and robust conversation with my teens. It helped me to understand where their strengths and interests lie and how to build on this when looking ahead to their future studies and career options.”
Craig Harris, Parent from Vancouver, BC
Results
- Users from over 40 countries
- 79% of students surveyed reported increased career knowledge and confidence
- >200 hours spent in-person with students, teachers, and parents leading school and community workshops, discussion groups, and user research
- (read more in the Case Study below)
Overview of Design Process
This four-part summary outlines how we developed a product vision and strategy, created user personas, conducted research, designed the UX and UI, and built and tested our product.
- Research and Analysis (Primary and secondary research, ideating with a user persona, competitive analysis and positioning).
- Learning Design (Understanding our user, educational objectives, and learning principles).
- Digital Design and Development (UI/UX).
- Measurement and Insights (User testing, results, and next steps).
Defining the Problem
Saying that there are plenty of frustrations with the career exploration process would be an understatement. Luckily for us, the students, parents, and teachers we interviewed were mainly aligned on the key problems:
- Information overload: an overabundance of data on the internet, and opinions within family and peer groups. The answers seem to be ‘out there’; it’s just a matter of sifting through everything else to find them.
- Lack of time: students’ schedules are more packed than ever. It’s difficult to find an hour to have a conversation with a parent or teacher, not to mention complete a lengthy assessment.
- Lack of urgency (*No one was explicit about this, so we had to read between the lines): planning one’s career path is seen as a very important, but rarely urgent, matter. It’s all too easy to punt on the big decisions without any immediate, tangible consequences (grad school, anyone?).
Essentially, teens feel overwhelmed, conflicted, and confused, while their parents and teachers often feel helpless as guides. This was corroborated by our secondary research (Millennials as a proxy, given limited data on Gen Z):
Empathy matters: Ideating with a persona
After conducting our initial research and analysis, we began the process of Affinity Mapping (organizing related facts into distinct clusters) and Persona Ideation (looking for alternative ways to view user’s problem and identify solutions) to clarify user needs and goals from her point of view.
Positioning Opportunity: Better UX and Instructional Design
Based on our user research and industry analysis, we plotted the most important functions and factors against the current offering levels of substitute products and services. Our data visualization helped us assess the current competitive landscape and understand where we had the best opportunity to address unmet user needs. We added ‘enScholar’ to the bunch to estimate our competitive strengths in light of our resources and capabilities.
We found opportunities to create value and differentiate ourselves in the areas of user experience and accessibility. In other words, users wanted, but were unable to find, a low-cost, engaging, mobile experience that could be completed in short modules.
Learning Design Objectives
Leading the learning and instructional design, my challenge was to achieve both simplicity in user experience and specificity in educational outcomes. We drew from established theory (see Learning Design Principles), as well as direct feedback from future users themselves (see Understanding Our User). Below are some highlights of how we structured our learning design process.
A holistic view of career education
Our research shows the happiest professionals have a large overlap with their occupation and their interests, strengths, and values (ISVs). Most students, however, build a career hypothesis on a single, strong interest, or super-power strength. We wanted students to keep the big picture in mind and see how each career matched across all of their ISVs. We used these learning principles to inform our design:
What makes our learning design different?
We wanted to think of enScholar as a decision-making framework, rather than a career assessment. We want students and their parents to learn how to:
- Reflect deeply on their interests, strengths, and values to find patterns and themes among them.
→ Traditional tools and assessments focus on solely on identifying ISVs, and not on understanding the ‘why’ behind them or connections between them.
2. Think critically about matching what they know about themselves with careers. This gives users the mental agility necessary to make better decisions regardless of the environment they’re in.
→Existing tools take the critical thinking out of the assessment and are only as good as their inputs (valid user and industry data, which change and evolve constantly).
3. Refine regularly their interests, strengths, values, and career matches as they gain new knowledge and experience.
→ Most career assessments are static — you finish the test and get the results. They don’t adapt to the user as she learns and grows. They’re also rarely in sync with what’s happening in industry and the career market.
User Experience Design
We stuck close to our research when designing the user experience. To solve the primary user problems of 1) information overload and 2) difficulty fitting career exploration into a busy schedule, we decided our design solution should incorporate video-guides, modular activities, and a mobile-friendly interface.
Video-Guided Intros for Better Onboarding
Anyone who’s had to completely re-assemble an IKEA desk knows that instructions are vital, even for simple tasks. We knew that for the user to get the most out of each activity, they first needed to understand the key concepts. We also knew that wading through lengthy, dull instructions can lead to user attrition. To set users up for success, we created short, introductory videos. We made the content relevant, using teen-specific examples, and sprinkled in a little humor when we could.
Modular, bite-sized activities for increased retention
Students told us they felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of career information available. They also lacked the time (and interest) to finish lengthy assessments. We decided to break each section into activities that could be completed in under 15 minutes, and made it easy to stop, save, and resume activities at any time.
Mobile-friendly convenience for students on-the-go
When we began designing enScholar, over half of North American youth already had smartphones. In our research, few if any of the traditional career assessments or related software were mobile-friendly. We saw an opportunity to create something convenient where users could make progress towards defining their careers in only a few minutes a day.
User Experience and Interface Walk Through
Measurement
Given varying data privacy policies across provinces, states, and countries, most of our measurement came from in-person user testing in the form of task-scenario observations, interviews, and surveys (formative and summative evaluation). We designed a high-level concept for the four core tools, then built a prototype for the first (Interests Explorer) to test and inform the design of subsequent tools.
We spent over 200 hours in-person with students, teachers, and parents. We led school and community workshops, discussion groups, and collected user research along the way. For gathering more specific user-engagement data, the volume of user-generated input, time-on-site, usage frequency, and activity completion rates can all be taken into account.
Insights
1. Students found the modular, mobile-friendly UX convenient; but there was a downside.
Most of the students we researched had never before done career development (or structured learning in general) on a mobile device. They found they would use the tools on their commutes to and from school, as well as on breaks. However, they would often get distracted by pop-up notifications they wouldn’t otherwise see on their desktop computer. To combat this, we prompted students within the app to set their phones to do not disturb mode during each session, which helped.
2. Procrastination and lack of urgency are major obstacles.
We found the majority of students were leaving important, career and college-related decisions to the last minute and expected a career assessment that would be a ‘magic bullet’ for their problems. In light of efficacy research, we designed our tools to be used over a period of time, with a focus on reflection and critical thinking. We found that to be successful, we needed to do a better job of informing teachers and parents why it was important to introduce the tools to students early in the school year.
3. Students wanted to find experiences that would enhance their knowledge of self and careers.
“Now that I know more about myself and careers, what do I do?” was a common question that made us think about how we could help students gain relevant ‘micro-experiences’. We began by making personalized suggestions to a small group of test users based on the interests, strengths, and values they had defined. We connected them with related in-person and online volunteer opportunities, nearby workshops, and online resources such as videos and tutorials. We had success (high follow-through and engagement) in helping students find short, low-cost opportunities and activities that would give them just enough knowledge or experiences to refine their Career Alignment profiles. However, we realized this was very difficult to scale without using technology.
Next Steps
This problem of scaling personalized suggestions for micro-experiences gave us the inspiration to launch our next platform TryIt!, a community of students and teachers curating the best STEM learning experiences on the internet. We ended up building a platform showcasing over 5,000 of the best videos, learning resources, and opportunities from around the web.
I’m always looking for good people, new projects, and interesting ideas. Say ‘hi’ at isaiah.w.b [at] gmail.com or on LinkedIn
