The Big Pivot

Changing our Direction Based on User Needs

Recap from the last post: ….

Moving Forward

This week, we intended to narrow down on the designs that we had presented to our clients, but were not sure how. The clients’ favorite idea conflicted with our faculty’s favorite idea which conflicted with the idea that seemed to be liked best by the students we spoke to. We talked to our program director and he mentioned that we might want to take a step back and stop focusing on concrete concepts at this point. We needed to strip down to the features of what those concrete ideas would need to entail. In other words, we needed look at what exactly needs to be accomplished by our concepts rather than the concepts themselves.

Career Discovery Loop

We decided that we should first make the “trial and error” path that we discovered through our employee research more concrete, realizing that it’s not really a linear path at all, but a series of loops.

Each loop consists of three phases:

During the identify phase, one can examine their interests so they can be matched to potential careers.

During the second phase of Explore, one can understand a career or careers of interest through research and experience.

During the final Evaluate phase, one reflects on their research and/or experiences to guide their new direction from there.

Even once this loop is complete, it continues over and over again as one becomes more confident in the path they want to follow and even as they narrow down further into that path.

Establishing Core Functionality

With this known need for students to go through the career discovery loop, we realized that the best way to help students go through this loop is through a system that assists them in going through some or all of the three stages. We came up with this core functionality that any solution would need to incorporate in order to be successful.

• In the identify stage, students should be able to input various factors into a system — these factors can include personality traits, favorite classes, activities they enjoy, etc.
• Using these factors, the system should be able to suggest career options and provide activities for the student to explore.
• Using these suggestions, the student can then proceed to experience the activity either inside the system or externally.
• Once they are finished with said experience, the student can evaluate the activity, what they liked or didn’t like, and determine whether or not they want to continue on in that field. If they do not wish to, they can go back to receive more career suggestions. This process continues until a student is confident in pursuing a specific path based on their evaluation of their experiences.

Looking Deeper into Features

We decided to do some user testing that involved testing individual aspects of this core functionality rather than fully fleshed out concepts. We went through the areas of collecting data, analyzing that data, reflection, exploration, and receiving job information and asked students about the different possible ways that each of those could be done and how they felt about each.

For the collection of data, we discussed the following possibilities with them: journal entries, connecting to existing social media accounts and feed, uploading videos and photos, quizzes about personalities, skills, and work styles, or choosing from a list of words, phrases, or photos

For the analysis of that collected data, we discussed the following potential options: suggestions of career fields based on one’s interests, suggestions of local activities based on possible career fields of interest to explore, or in-person conversations with people related to fields of interest

For reflection, we asked students how they felt about these possibilities of rating a research or first-hand experience: ranking various experiences to compare them, giving an experience a thumbs up / thumbs down, choosing from a list of pre-selected responses, writing an open review, or answering a likert scale or giving the experience a star rating

Finally, for exploration activities and job information, we conducted card sorting activities where we gave students a list of 20–30 different possible cards to choose from for each category. We had them sort the cards into whether they would be “very interested,” “somewhat interested,” or “not interested” in that option. We had them justify and explain each card they moved so we could understand their reasoning for placing certain cards in certain categories.

From these sessions, we received some valuable feedback on what student react to more positively than others, but still felt that something was missing. We had a long conversation afterwards on why students didn’t seem excited by what we were showing them and it didn’t seem as if they would actually use any of our designs. It was time for a change…

The Big Realization

After testing our various rounds of designs, we got consistent feedback that students felt that although the designs could be useful, they didn’t feel they were for them at this point in their lives. Most students expressed how busy they were with other things — classes, sports, extra curricular activities, hanging out with their friends, etc. Career planning really wasn’t a priority at this stage in time and they felt that they could wait until they were older.

With this new perspective, we realized our opportunity statement needed to shift. Instead of simply giving early high school students a system with which they can identify, explore, and evaluate post-high school options, we needed to motivate early high school students to use, follow through, and continue engaging with a system of this type in the first place and help them realize the importance of prioritizing this cycle at an earlier stage of high school. In other words, our opportunity needed to be:

“How can we motivate and engage students to utilize the identify, explore, evaluate cycle at an earlier stage so they can find a career path they are confident in?”

With this shifted opportunity statement, we determined the need to annotate our core functionality model accordingly by adding in friction points that were going to be extremely important to consider in our designs.

• First of all, without a strong motivation or influence pushing a student to begin using the system in the first place, the system may remain unused.
• Next, even once students proceed to identify their interests and receive associated recommendations, there must be a drive or motivation for them to follow through with the system and explore those recommendations.
• Finally, due to the importance of repeating this cycle of exploration and evaluation to refine one’s chosen career paths, there must be a driving factor pushing students to continue engaging w

Without accounting for these points in our designs, the system will not effectively survive or have the intended impact on the students interacting with it.

Continuing our Visions

At this point, our end-of-semester presentation was nearing so we would not have adequate time to fully flesh out new concepts and test them with users, but we did have time to develop two possible manifestations of the core functionality with the annotated friction points.

Our first idea was a part-time job rotation program which would consist of a series of part-time job experiences through which students could further evaluate their interests. With this system students would input their interests, participate in several different job experiences based on those interests, then evaluate how much they liked or disliked each experience.

This system accounts for the identified friction points, as students are motivated to use, follow through, and engage with the system due to their need for a part time job and desire to make money. And while doing this, they are participating in the ideal loop of exploration and evaluation.

Our second idea was an in-school exploration application where students are assigned to use a mobile application in which they can complete various exploration and reflection exercises, activities, and challenges. The system builds based on the students’ responses so that new, more relevant activities can be suggested. Progress is tracked and student’s receive “points” for the various activities.

This system also accounts for the identified friction points, as students begin engagement as a requirement in the classroom then continue to follow through and engage with the system due to its gamification and competition aspect.

Next Steps

These two manifestations were just serving as examples for purposes of our presentation and are were not indicative of what our final direction will be. We plan to ideate more during our post-presentation co-design session with our client as well as during the beginning of next semester. Check out our next post to see how our presentation went as well as the co-design session with our client that followed it!