UX Design Hybrid Application: Nova - Aligning the Opportunities
“Although only 11.2% of recent graduates (22–30) make up the unemployment rate, about 44% of recent graduates are currently underemployed”.
— Forbes.com (2017)
There is a common misconception between the terms unemployment and underemployment when it comes to making an association to the current job market. Many believe that a number of recent graduates are experiencing unemployment once they graduate from College or University. This would entail that a large portion of the demographic is currently not working. However, this is not the case, the truth is found through various studies that about 44% of recent graduates are currently working in a position that does not require a university degree. With a frightening statistic that hovers over the current job market, many recent graduates are looking to gain immediate work experience to combat the ever-changing demands set by recruiters in hopes of finding desirable work. This has caused many to believe that having a degree in a field of study no longer holds the regard it once had in our meritocratic society. It is noted that many employers look to recruiting individuals who have past experiences in the field over those who simply graduate and have nothing to show for. We then have to ask ourselves the question of, how are we able to help graduates and individuals who are looking to build their professional portfolios find the experiences they need to stay competitive in the current job market?
One of the most rewarding things that an individual can experience in life is meaningful work. Work that allows you to display your efforts at a higher level towards a goal that will ultimately impact your community. I was lucky enough to have been given an opportunity to help solve a problem that many of my peers face on a daily basis. I think many of us dream of working for a top-tier company one day. Whether it is a company that you own or one that you believe in, the last thing that you want to experience is not being able to show the world what you are capable of doing when given the right opportunities. For my first client project, my team and I were given a company that revolves around the idea of both investing in and developing the best version of yourself. The company we were assigned to was called “The Academy of Tomorrow”.
Team
Client
“Why are we providing courses in leadership and entrepreneurship to executives and not the future generation?”. — Lital Marom
This was a question that stood out from our initial conversation with our client, Lital Marom who is the CEO of The Academy of Tomorrow. It was clear that this led to building the bases behind the philosophy of The Academy, planting the seeds of personal development and leadership in individuals so that they have the proper mindset and skill set to ideally impact their environment. Our client, Lital Marom, is a sought out keynote speaker & serial entrepreneur who has a TED talk and studied Investment Banking at NYU Stern, later transitioning into studying AI at MIT. Somewhere along the way, she decided that would be a mission of hers to help improve the quality of education for everyone. She decided to open The Academy of Tomorrow, an organization dedicated to helping high school students and young leaders by providing workshops that develop the necessary hard skills to be to excel against real-world adversaries and challenges around personal growth.
Lital originally came to us with a website that held all of the information about The Academy. However, she had developed a new business model for The Academy and wanted to have us build a mobile application that had both social and business/employment capabilities. The app would be divided into two user groups, a corporate/recruiter user and a student/young leader user group. The idea that Lital had brought to us was that she wanted to build a platform that made both the recruiting and experience building aspects of personal professional development easier for both parties. The challenge we had in front of us was bridging the gap between capable individuals who are interested in developing their professional portfolio with the right opportunities.
After meeting with Lital in person, it was apparent that the scope of the project revolved around focusing on our user group rather than the corporate aspect. The primary function of the application was to allow users to attempt challenges or projects set by a company. This ideally allows the user’s work to be presented to the frontline of large corporations. This also eases the recruiting process by allowing HR to discover a pool of top-tier individuals who are capable of displaying what they have to offer. This was the core of the business goals, however, as user-centered designers, it was our obligation to find a perfect balance between the business and user goals to create the best possible product.
Research
Our approach to achieving this goal required us to study our target audience by conducting survey and interviews. This allows us to determine the motivations and frustrations, as well as the needs and wants of the user. This ideally allows us to create a product that encompasses both of the ideas and voices collected in the spectrum of our research. After our initial meeting with our client, we identified our target users as individuals between the ages of 18–30. That being said, we also identified the focus groups to be recent graduates, individuals who are looking to work in their desired field of interest, and individuals who want to develop their professional portfolio and gain experience in their field of interest.
Surveys and Interviews
Over the course of our research process, we were able to conduct 7 interviews with individuals who fall within our targeted users. We were also able to conduct a survey that generated 34 survey respondents. One of the most important, yet challenging aspects of developing a well-designed product is asking the right questions to your users. By doing so, it allows us to remove the variable of building a product under the impression of a bias. This was definitely a portion of the research phase that took some time to develop, however when it came to releasing our survey and conducting our interviews, we were able to receive insightful findings that ultimately influenced our design focus.
Survey Findings
After analyzing the data that we had obtained over the course of our research process. We were able to extract a lot of interesting insights that played a key role in the development of our product.
Interestingly enough, we weren’t expecting to receive a heavily one-sided response to the topic of professional development. However, this was integral to our research as it demonstrates the demand from our sample population to develop professionally. Our findings state that individuals who are within the age range of 18–30 are willing to put in the work to move forward into their desired careers.
Another key finding that we had found through our research landed on the topic of whether individuals were currently working in your desired field of interest. With 44% of our respondents stating “No” to working in their desired field of interest, we found an alignment with the Forbes insight that we had displayed earlier in this case study. This shows us that I may not be enough for students to finish of with a degree and that she would be looking to build their portfolios to stay competitive.
Interview Insights
After extracting information from our surveys, we moved on to the collected data that we had from our interviewees. This allowed us to go in depth with our user group and more importantly, allowed the users to voice their opinions on the topic of the current job market.
The first extracted quote speaks to our previous stats by Forbes in that most of the people in our generation are underemployed, meaning that although they may be currently employed and/or have accessibility to finding employment, they feel overqualified for the work that they do.
The second quote reveals the negative connotations around the current job market. With keywords such as saturated and intimidating, user’s associate fear with around the topic of career marketplace.
A key finding that we extracted from this question revealed to us that users believe that it’s very difficult to stay competitive & to properly network with people. This showed us that we needed to somehow create a mobile application that carries the values of equal opportunity as well as a messaging function that eases the networking portion of job searching.
Competitor Journey Mapping
Journey maps usually revolve around a customer’s/user’s interactions with a store or application. However, after extensive domain research, we found that our main competitor in the market was a company named Riipen. Although Riipen has a similar approach to delivering content to its users, we decided that it would be an insightful approach to see how different users would interact with the web application. We did this by combining a competitor comparative analysis with a journey map to highlight any opportunities for new implementations on sides where our competitor may be lacking, taking them into consideration as well as identifying common key pain points that users would be experiencing will accessing and exploring through the domain.
Competitor Journey Map Key Findings
We conducted this test with 3 different user’s, this is what we found.
- Touchpoints for the user as well as displayed information was poorly organized. User’s that were taken through the site noticed that many of the labels were too small . Along with that observation, user’s also stated that contents of the website were not as clear and concise as they had hoped.
- Create better information architecture. User’s stated that it was difficult to find entire project briefs while exploring the domain.
- Another pain point that user’s revealed was the lack of communication functionalities displayed on the site. This made connecting with other user’s as well as networking very difficult on their platform.
After careful consideration, this method of testing a site with different user’s helped us identify gaps in the current market. This was a major contributor to helping us identify the must have features.
Identifying the Problems & Design Focuses
Once we had finished extracting all of our data, we were able to clarify the problems we wanted to solve. We were also able to decide what our design focus was going to be and what our product should encompass.
Planning
The planning stage was very crucial when it came to determining the direction we wanted to take our design. We started the process with an affinity diagram.
Affinity Diagram
An affinity diagram is essentially a tool used by designers to help gather large amounts of qualitative data and groups them into their commonalities, natural relationships, or deeper level themes. The objective is to identify consistencies and patterns between all the data obtained and develop key insights that can be used to solidify the design direction.
Once we had conducted an affinity diagram around the qualitative data we had obtained, we were able to extract information based on the common key insights in our findings that would become the characteristics, motivations, and frustrations of an entity that we can label as our user persona.
User Persona
Our user persona was developed from the information we had obtained through our research process. This was the individual who we were going to design our application around.
Must-have Features
Another insightful finding that occurs after an affinity diagram is that you can analyze the qualitative data to help determine the must have features that the application will carry. Along with having a persona, setting the must-have features allowed us to have a sense clarity with the team by creating a clear direction for our design choices.
User Flow and Site Map
From there, it became apparent for us to create an effective user flow and site map. At this point of the planning phase, we were able to merge both the business goals and user goals to develop the best possible product. This allowed me to take on the perspective of my user persona, thinking about the most efficient and effective way the application would be adopted by our users.
After solidifying all of the components we needed to have within the application, we moved on to designing the prototypes and wireframes.
Design
Paper Prototyping
This was one of the most insightful moments of the entire project. As a team, we decided to approach the paper prototyping phase by conducting a design studio. This allowed both of the UX and UI teams to have a voice in the designing of screens. The effectiveness of a design studio allowed us to create a near perfect prototype by eliminating the bias of having one or two core designers. It also helped us determine what was important about the design choices by thoroughly covering every single decision made.
User Testing
Once we had solidified the paper prototype, we moved on to the testing phase. This allows us as designers to get the necessary feedback when it comes to developing the best possible product. This process also allows us to incorporate the user by immersing them in the flow of the product. After conducting 8 user tests of the product we were able to find several pain points in our designs.
These identified pain points brought us back into the studio with a mission to create an effective function that can be implemented into our final iteration of the first version.
One of the functionalities that we wanted to recreate after testing was the filtering system. Users would state that “The hit real estate was too small”, as well as the cluttered design didn’t feel intuitive. This deemed to be a pain point that we created which made us reimagine our design choices. We decided to take a simpler and more familiar filtering experience.
Another function we decided to change after testing was the flow of the “test” portion. We decided that it was too boring for the user’s to go through such a tedious task. From there, an instant match of what we thought would be a great implementation was that of Tinder’s swiping functionality. It was both fun and fast, and that was what our client wanted this portion of the application to be like.
Wire-framing
To finalize the UX process, we took every single aspect of our study and created the wireframes. These screens became the architectural blueprints for our application. Everything from the user insights, business goals, must have features, and user flow, make up the wire frames. This was the hand off point to the UI team, their job was to create an effective yet aesthetically pleasing design that would appeal to our users.
UI Process
Mood
These were some of the keywords that the UI team discovered during our initial meeting with our client. They wanted to keep a sense of youthfulness in a professional manner. Keeping the design “Clean, Confident, and Hopeful”.
Logo
Our client was open to changing the name of the application. After running through about 10 different names with Lital, we all decided that Nova was the better of the options. From there we moved on to creating a new logo for the new name. We held another design studio knowing that this was the most effective way to deliver an idea that we were all confident in. After creating numerous drawings and versions of the logo, we landed upon this logo and presented it to our client. Luckily she was in love with our new logo.
Style Tile
Summary
After developing the necessary components of the mobile application and carefully integrating the business goals and user goals into the build of the app. My team and I were able to successfully execute a viable product that retained all of the core features our client wanted us to integrate as well as the insights of the users. We created a practical solution to help bridge the gap between capable individuals with the right opportunities.
I would like to introduce NOVA, a business and recruitment social networking service that will create a platform for individuals to express who they are, what they’ve done, as well as showcase what they are able to achieve.
