Creating a Solution for Today’s Career Planning Problems with Pathfinder
Have you ever started a new job, unsure of what to expect, and ended up dissatisfied? Or wanted to embark on a new career journey, but had no idea how or where to start? You’re not alone.
Over the last two and a half weeks, my team and I worked to create a solution for the many roadblocks people face when trying to find and pursue their dream job.
THE CHALLENGE
The City of DC is looking for ways to help people find and plot a course for the job of their dreams. The goal is to eliminate the barriers keeping people from pursuing jobs that are of interest or best fit for them, being able to explore pathways, and plan out ways to pursue new careers. This should strive to be a tool that innovates to change lives, not just another learning management system or social network.
MY ROLE
Project Lead
TEAM
Ani Yeghnazar — Research Lead
Joshua Lagman — Interactions Lead
TOOLS USED
Miro
Axure
UserTesting.Com
RESEARCH
At the start of this sprint, we were given five user stories to get us started.
As a learner, I want to discover new career paths so that I can decide which I’d like to learn more about.
As a learner, I want to be able to find roles I don’t know how to describe.
As a learner, I want to find subject matter experts in a respective field, so that I can follow them or find their path and related content.
As a learner, I want to see an overview of different ways to get a role, so that I can decide if it’s a good fit.
As a learner, I want to plot out my own path, so that I can start making progress toward a new career and see my progress.
To begin our research, our team started brainstorming who our ideal users were. We decided that our users didn’t necessarily fall into an age category or have a specific level of education. We wanted to find individuals who have either changed career paths or thought about it and people who weren’t quite sure what they wanted to do for their career. We then created and sent out a screener survey to find people who fell into those categories.
While our survey responses were coming in, we looked around at different career sites for some competitive analysis. While we saw lots of great features, we didn’t see any websites that were really doing what we hoped to. We saved a lot of websites to reference later for some inspiration.
Our team conducted 15 interviews with students, individuals that have gone through a few career changes, and some who are exploring their options. The main goal going into the interview process was to learn something from everyone we were able to speak to.
SYNTHESIS
As we were finishing our interviews, we gathered key insights and quotes to start Affinity Mapping. A few trends that stood out were that several interviewees chose not to use professional networking sites, some felt like they had wasted time on their career journey, and a few made a change because they weren’t feeling fulfilled in their day-to-day.
A few quotes that stood out were:
“I’m hesitant to ask for help in career planning.”
“I don’t necessarily know about job titles that I would be interested in.”
“I wish I knew more about what the journey entailed because it took longer than expected.”
“Society doesn’t tell you to pursue your hobbies, they tell you to find something realistic.”
We wanted to keep our users involved in our process, so we created three different personas, representing those who would be our ideal users.
PROBLEM
We believe job seekers and career changers need more helpful tools to find the best career path because too many people end up dissatisfied in their career.
How might we provide a seamless and easy experience to leverage their skills and interests to find and take steps in the direction of their ideal career, increasing overall career fulfillment?
We looked back at the similar websites for inspiration and began ideating our solution: Pathfinder.
IDEATION & DESIGN
We used Agile methodologies, so our team was constantly making changes to make sure our product was the best it could be.
Early in the process, we thought through our user flow. Initially, we had several features prominently displayed on the home page. We realized that while these features were useful, they weren’t a priority, which led us to simplifying our flow.
We worked in a Design Studio and used Charrettes to throw around a lot of our ideas to make sure we were all on the same page and working towards the same goal.
When we began putting our designs into Axure, it felt like everything was coming together.
To begin, new users are prompted to begin a skills test to find career matches based on their test answers.
After taking the skills test, users can see their top skills. From there, they can view careers that use different combinations of their top skills.
As I mentioned, we ended up having a very simple user flow. Initially, we had created separate pages for Career Info and Mentors, but our Interactions Lead suggested minimizing the number of pages on the site by utilizing the pop up windows to give our users more information without having them leave the page they were on.
The last major section is the Career Dashboard, where users can see their saved information and track their progress.
We conducted 11 usability tests that revealed several small issues that we then implemented into our “final” design (is anything really final?) A second round of 9 usability tests validated our designs and website functionality, with the exception of a few minor suggestions.
NEXT STEPS & FINAL THOUGHTS
A few next steps for Pathfinder include improving search capabilities, providing a full skills breakdown, integrating a job search engine, and building a mobile app.
Working on our first group project was a fun challenge. It required improving my communication and learning when to fight for ideas and when to take a step back. Thankfully, I worked with a great group that worked hard and agreed that we needed to keep our users at the center of our process.