Breaking the Low Income Ceiling
Technological literacy has become crucial in today’s society. Last year, White House economists predicted that low-income workers — those who make less than $20 an hour — face the highest probability of losing their job to individuals with technical skills and experience. The problem is that certain people aren’t getting access to the training to get tech jobs.
We worked in a team of four designing a web solution for low income workers providing access to various types of technical training. The training needs to offer up-to-date technical skills and give the learner an array of technical skills and an aptitude to succeed. The goal is to help unskilled workers move into better jobs.
Finding Out More
Our assumptions took us a few different directions and we had gone as granular as we need to focus this on people who were former inmates, immigrants, or women in a manual labor field. So we set off to get interviews with those groups. As we gathered research we found that we didn’t need to go that deep with our research as everyone in those demographics had the same goals to get that job that better job.
After we brought it up to that user, we did about 10 in-person interviews but I felt like we could get a better idea of the direction we should go by getting this in front a larger audience. We put together a survey to get as many responses as possible.
One of the main goals of the research was to uncover how people would like to learn a new skill and what skills would they like to learn. We found that our responses were split on the path to get there. Combined with our in-person research it stayed 50–50 with picking classes a la carte or having a track to follow. So we couldn’t go wrong, right?
The other main part that drove our survey results were the skills that our users wanted to learn. From our, in-person research we had gathered the categories that we presented in our survey. From that, we uncovered that the consensus was that the users wanted to get jobs in IT, Office Management and Digital Design.
These channels ended up driving our design as we went through the process and we looked towards expanding to others in later builds.
Another insight that we gathered from our research was our users wanted to connect with people as they went through this process. Most people had attempted to do something online but there was no accountability or support system. They wanted mentors and the ability to ask questions to help them along the way.
Who are these people?
I decided that rather than a persona that we should focus the empathy map. From our above research some we decided that all of us at some point had fallen into our user group.
I don’t think we unearthed anything groundbreaking with our map but I do think it revealed that our users are unsure of their future. This helped us in our initial design and something that we wanted to address deeper in the future releases. In our empathy map, we also wanted to surface that our users needed something to show when they were done with our classes. We had discussed how we could meet those needs as we moved into our user story.
What do they need to succeed?
This is where are we really needed to get this right for our users and spent most of our time. We had multiple versions on our story map and spent more than 12 hours workshopping this. That was a large amount time with the short project deadline that we were dealing with as we only had 48 hours to work on this as a team.
In our first session after about 3 hours, we had thought we had our user story down. After we all came back to meet we decided that it was too much for our initial build but we wanted to keep the core features. This leads us to more cuts and consolidations, as we did this went from our narratives of Assess Current Skills, Teacher Introduction, Course Content, and then Connect with Peers. As we consolidated we realized that our teacher and peer interaction could be merged into one and supplemented with employer connections. We also moved a large part of the tasks into the Course Content page.
What will they see?
Once we had our ideas on what needed to be built we moved into wireframes and user flow. Doing this changed our story map one more time as we realized that some tasks like the message board had enough weight to warrant it’s own screen. I feel like this is the part when the project comes to life. Putting on the board all the different ways that the site could look like and how that would impact the user makes it real to me.
We got into the required screens and what needed to be wireframed we divided and conquered. In other projects, I knew that we needed to standardize our builds. We went with a card based and picked our colors based on the marker we used to build this.
What Can We Build?
As we continued to build this out we realized that we were running out of time. Like any project, we had to adapt and we had planned for this. In our user story map, we had our goal but we had our back up plan. We had decided that the mentor functionality and the tailored courses would be in future releases.
We felt that our research was strong enough to justify this delay in the release but that would be the next step in our build. The business model could also justify having mentor access as a premium feature. As we matured we would look forward to building a base of classes and then expanding into other fields for our users.
From Ideas to Sketch
My main task in this project was to build the messages screen. If you remember from our research and user story that our users needed a place to ask their questions and connect with our people. As I wireframed I tried to incorporate these themes so that we could easily add to them later with our mentor messages.
In our initial release, we focused on asking questions to people who were taking the same class and then creating direct messages with your peers(this would also allow for an easy upgrade to mentors in the future).
At first, I wanted to display the two most important pieces of information. What class the user was posting in and the actual messages.
The longer I stared at this design the more I knew it was not going to communicate what I needed it to. The cards on the left that displayed the discussion, bookmarks, or direct messages looked like they were connected to the 3 classes that they could toggle between.
I was also having a hard time on how we would show replies to messages and you can see one idea in the first photo that was inspired by a Slack reply.
The other part of the initial design was trying to rectify the imaging of the rest of our site to the messaging screen. We had. large cards with image underlays that highlighted the class. After further review, we nixed that idea in favor or a simpler design.
In the updated versions and in the final design you can see that I moved the bookmarks to the other side and made it a part of the background. The same style was implemented for switching between classroom discussions and direct messages.
One feature that I focused on was the ability to ask a question directly from a bookmarked part of the class. We felt that this would be a seamless way to add things to review for later or ask the community. When the user clicks on the bookmark, they have the ability to jump back into the course content if they need to review as well.
Usability
The feedback we got was pretty consistent. We tested usability with 10 people and they had some issues with the following. We had them attempt to perform 8 tasks in the system and observed where they had difficulty.
- Homepage: How many hours to complete the Prototyping course?
- Go to your dashboard and view a bookmark
- How many replies did you have to the question you asked on 3/27/18
- Find where you can ask a question to the the live message board
- Name a course that you’ve completed
- What’s your overall score
- Toggle between two courses on the message board
- Message Board: preview a past bookmark and ask it as a question.
Navigator from different parts in the system and understanding all the dashboard features.
The workflow and where they would jump back in if they had to leave a session and come back later.
The multiple bookmarking pieces were a bit confusing as there are a few places to see them and we saw failures in that usability.
Information on the dashboard was a bit confusing to be so far down.
The course content page was tough to get a true usability as we didn’t have any real material here. I think this added to the confusion as this is the core part of the site.
Revisions
The major take away on this project for me was understanding the role of workflows and the jobs to be done the process. If we identify those then the design would flow that and be successful. To me, it felt like we are 85% percent there with this release. From the jobs to be done, I think I would focus more on the content page more as this was the heart of the system.
I felt that our tone was good but could have been more helpful if we had a formal onboarding process. In onboarding, we could address some the feedback we got from our usability testing and continue to create that helping tone to help on the users need to feel connected.
In future releases, I feel that we could address those concerns and also add the features that we discussed such mentors and getting connected to employers.
Thanks so much for taking the time to read this. If you liked this or have any further questions or feedback, head over to my other case studies or reach out via LinkedIn.
