Exploration vs Path: Building the Udacity Career Portal

As a product manager at Udacity, I help create products to better serve our students every day. In this post, I’d like to give a peek behind the scenes at how we think about building those tools.

Last Wednesday, we were thrilled to announce the launch of the Udacity Career Portal, a personalized job search guide for students. I want to dig into one of the key product decisions we faced in designing the Career Portal, how it’s a common choice that products have to make, and why it matters: exploration vs path.

One way to think about exploration vs path is as a spectrum for how to present information to a user, both visually and in terms of structuring the overall user flow.

One of the goals we had with the Career Portal was to present to our students the wide range of Careers resources we offer — but what was the right way to do it? Should we show our students a preview of everything, letting them pick and choose where to begin? Or should we make a step-by-step experience that recommends a resource to start with, minimizing distraction?

Exploration

Examples of products on the exploration end include things like:

• Your Pinterest board
• Video game character selection
• Your Amazon homepage
• The Udacity course catalog

Udacity course catalog, video game character selection, Airbnb homepage

This is best for products where the emphasis is on giving a fast and easy overview to skim a wide variety of options, with minimal effort from the user. In the character selection example, you can see all your options at a glance, with only a simple swipe of the joystick to quickly flick through Wario, Peach, Luigi, and more.

Pros

• Exposes many options with little effort to user
• Gives the user a sense of agency and control

Cons

• Requires more cognitive effort from user to decide what to click next
• Makes it difficult for the user to tell “where they left off,” if the user leaves partway and returns later
• Requires you to account for, and design for, a wide range of possible user experiences depending on what the user chooses to explore

Path

On the other end of the spectrum, common path examples are:

• Payment checkout flows
• Onboarding flows
• Video games with linear storylines

Slack onboarding flow, Amazon checkout flow, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

This is best for products where the emphasis is on getting the user to progress towards a specific goal, with minimal distraction. To stick with the video game example, the Uncharted series is famous for investing in very high quality storylines, which means the developers don’t want you to experience just any story, they want you to experience the exact story they wrote. The result is a game experience so linear that it’s been described as “watching a movie in video game form,” with very few decision points along the way.

Pros

• Requires little cognitive effort from user to decide what to click next, as there are minimal options
• Makes it easy for the user to tell “where they left off,” if the user leaves partway and returns later (“You are on step 3 of 5 of onboarding”)
• Gives you high degree of control over the user experience

Cons

• Requires more effort from the user to explore full range of options, as new options may be hidden initially and only incrementally exposed as they progress through the flow
• Can feel overly constraining and prescriptive to the user

How We Made Our Decision

So, to recap: We needed to find the best way to present the range of Careers resources available to our students. This decision centered around a particular feature in the Career Portal called the Career Track.

Our initial designs actually focused more on the exploration end of the spectrum. Here you can see an early version of the Career Track, which featured “cards” that allowed students to explore a range of topics to get started with.

We thought that it would be important to emphasize the wide variety of resources available, and to let students choose where to begin. But when we put these designs in front of testers and observed what they did, we quickly realized a few things:

• It took a long time for students to decide where to start. Many felt they needed to scroll through all the (many) available options before they chose what to start with, and felt uncertain about where they wanted to begin. It seemed that the decision was less empowering than we’d hoped, and in fact more paralyzing.
• Watching how students navigated resources, we started to realize that we did actually did have an order we hoped they’d follow. For example, there were resources that we recommend students check out first before others, and it was too easy for students to miss these items without more direction.

Both of these suggested we should swing more towards the path end of the spectrum, but we struggled with how to move that direction while still giving our students control over their experience.

Here’s where we ended up, with a Career Track that has numbered steps and a linear layout, but with dropdowns at top right that allow the student to explore options to customize the Career Track at any time, and no restrictions on what order the student ultimately chooses to do things in:

This redesign had the desired effect. Students did mostly start with the resources at the top of the Career Track, which is where we hoped they’d start. At the same time, they recognized and liked that they could tailor the experience to their needs.

So in the end, one takeaway is that exploration vs path is not an either/or decision; it really is a spectrum! Ultimately, we were able to strike a balance to deliver the best experience for our students.

If you want to read more about exactly what the Udacity Career Portal ended up being, check out our blog post here.

Hope you enjoyed this peek into how we think about product here at Udacity. If you found this interesting or helpful, let me know in the comments below!