DM — “Find Your Course” Survey

Published in

Greg Soper’s Portfolio

5 min readNov 6, 2018

A simplified view of the final overall feeling and flow of the survey.

Note: This is a succinct recording of my thoughts on the project. If you’d like to know more about the project, contact me!

Take the survey for yourself here!

Overview

A personality quiz that helps prospective DevMountain students decide on their course.

Problem:

General knowledge of technical careers is lacking amongst prospective DevMountain students. New applicants gravitate toward the Web Development course, even though it might not be the best fit. If they knew more about the options available to them, perhaps they would choose another course.

Proposed Solution:

Implement a robust online personality survey, featured on the DevMountain home page. The survey assesses the personality of the applicant and gives them ratings for how well they fit into each of the courses that DevMountain offers, and the resultant field of practice. This survey will be built on sound personality profile data models built by our partner, JourneyFront.

My Role:

Project Manager
UX Designer
Journeyfront and DevMountain point of contact

Project Considerations:

Some aspects of this project were dependent on Journeyfront implementation and thus were out of my ability to change, though I did design with these constraints in mind.
This project was conceived and defined before my role at DM even began. While I still conducted ideation and discovery, it was limited in this project.
As of the time of this writing the survey has not been launched, so I have no success metrics to offer.

My Activities:

Wire-framing and prototyping.
Gathering feedback on flow and visuals.
Coordinating data-model creation efforts. (In order to make sure the personality profiles powering the quiz were sound, we needed to have at least 25 practicing professionals take a data-gathering survey created by Journeyfront.)
Implementing the newly created design system into the existing designs.
Creating illustrations and visual assets to make the survey as fun as possible, especially considering the many questions required to complete it.

Thoughts and Notes from me:

Because the survey was fairly straightforward, I was able to put most of my design energy into the details. It was a nice change of pace compared to data-heavy admin portals.
I initially made the mistake of not designing mobile-first. I quickly fixed this.
Working on this project usually involved me completing everything I could, then putting it aside as I waited on various roadblocks to be cleared. Some portions of the survey (e.g. the results page) couldn’t even be designed for until we had a more solid idea of what the survey itself would contain.
No one asked me to make the illustrations, icons, or background, but I became convinced that they were needed and did them in my own time. I very much enjoyed making them, and I’m glad they worked out!
I received a huge amount of help and feedback from the Product Hive slack community. This survey is in large part thanks to their help.
It was interesting to see the new Design Language start to take shape in the form of this survey. It is a huge departure from the regular DM look and feel, but that was done very intentionally.
I loved working with our excellent developer, James Lemire. We used the heck out of Zeplin to handoff files, and had some extremely productive sit down sessions as he was implementing my designs. We discovered together how to prevent the survey from reverting to the top of the page between questions. By keeping the scroll height consistent between questions, the user will have a smooth transition from question to question.

Design Debt:

I would like to revisit the basic structure of the survey itself. I am interested in seeing how much we could take out of the survey before it’s integrity is brought into question. As it stands, the survey is fairly long which is sure to be a hurdle for many survey respondents.