Caroline Guimarães
As a UX Design student at Digital House, I worked with my group to tackle the challenge of employability for multi-talented people. Our journey led us to create the Learn and Work app, a digital solution designed to connect users with learning and job opportunities.
Company:
Digital House
My Role:
Product Designer
Year:
2020
How it all started
As a UX Design student at Digital House for a period of almost 5 months, my group and I were given a subject matter and we had to develop a solution to that topic. Our subject matter was Employability for those with many talents.
As we had already had some classes on how to carry out a UX Design process, I will tell you a little bit more about all the work we have done until the end of our program, when we delivered our digital product, Learn and Work app.
Desk Research
The first thing to do after receiving our topic was to do some researches on the internet to find more information about it. We dug down trying to figure out how people with many talents usually deal with that, and what we discovered was pretty impressive:
Since 2016, there has been a 78% increase in LinkedIn job posts that highlight work flexibility
24% of the Brazilian labor market is already autonomous
73% of job seekers say the process of looking for a job is one of the most stressful events in life
It takes recruiters only six seconds to evaluate a candidate’s resume
9% of job seekers say they use social networks in their job search
- McKinsey Global Institute
After we discovered about how companies are more interested in people with more than one ability, we wanted to gather feedback from the existing users. We set up some in-person interviews and asked them some questions. We wanted to know some aspects of their professional lives such as:
What kind of people has multiple talents?
How did they learn those abilities?
How did they organize themselves among those multiple talents and activities?
Do those talents have some connection with one another?
Overview of their drivers
Based on the interviews we set up four personas and after analyzing all the data we've from them, we started the Affyniti Map and found out some interesting points:
Most of them are graduated from the university
Speaks two or more languages
Do not work in the undergraduate field
Some of them have more than one job because it's necessary, not a passion
The income is not the most important thing for some
For most of the interviewed people, the main problem with having more than one occupation is the organization of tasks
Persona
Jéssica works as a Designer and Motion Graphics. During her free time, she enjoys working as a freelancer. She also works as a volunteer in some events and in design communities.
She likes to be connected in social media and is always looking for some new courses to do in order to keep learning, but this makes her feel overwhelmed most of the time. Her very good dream is to find a way to join all theses abilities and put it into something bigger.
User journey
The journey is a complete map of our persona's weekly routine and behavior. We have identified some opportunities to get her attention, such as when she is on her way to work on the bus or even when she is at home searching for some new course to attend.
Our group realized that we needed to build a digital product that could adapt to her schedule and routine, in order to help her instead of making her feel bored.
Ideation and Validation
After identifying the main pain points during the research, we come up with more than 15 concepts to solve the problem for the initial phase.We tested our idea with sketches about all the processes the users might do while navigating into our solution.We inquired about our group to vote for the best ideas.
Sketches
We started the design process with low fidelity wireframes. This way, we were able to go through many design options quickly. Some design ideas we put into such as: login screen with the LinkedIn option, opening screen with the career path possibilities, videos and text content and daily knowledge pills.
Wireframe
At the beginning of the design process, we created wireframes for testing purposes after doing some sketches. Those wireframes were made with Figma.
The wireframe was thought to guide the user to navigate through our solution easily, choosing a path of knowledge, taking some tests about the content, and finally, getting in touch with job opportunities.
User Testing
User testing is an important tool to ensure that the user will know how to easily navigate and understand the purpose of the product. We did a testing round in order to reveal possible usability problems. We wanted to see how effective the app was while being used by a person completely outside the project. User testing was one of the final phases during our UX process.
We have decided to take in-person usability tests and in total, we've made three user testings, with four different people. The first one with low fidelity wireframe and the other two with the high fidelity one. All the user testings helped us to improve our project with some unexpected insights that came up during the navigation.
High Fidelity
Once we tested out all usability mistakes, we started designing the final screens in Figma.
During the UI Design process, we decided as a group to use the colors Blue, Yellow, Dark Purple, and Grey. We came up with those colors after doing a benchmarking with some of the main students' course platforms online, such as Cousera and Linkedin.
We followed the Material Design guidelines, including the icons, but always keeping in mind the interface requirements and adhering to the brand guidelines.
Learnings
Despite not begin a real solution, the UX process has thought me how important Research and everything that comes with it is. The best part about designing interfaces is that we were able to get feedback. We can study how users interact with our design and using this data we can improve the efficiency of the product.
Going through all this, the user might find a different way or use a different process to reach their goal. But, that’s how it works. You get educated and go through the iterations again.
