The Problem

The concept of job security has lost all its meaning. Regardless of whether you are in a fortune 500 company or startups, layoffs can happen at any moment. The evidence is the devastating layoff period towards the end of 2022 and starting 2023 with over 500000 people laid off from companies like Google, Amazon, Meta, etc. People are starting to realize that they need to improve and strengthen their existing skill sets. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts a 15% increase in employment in technology occupations from 2021 to 2031, indicating a significant rise in demand for skilled professionals in this field. A similar trend is also taking place in Europe.

While there are plenty of resources out there for people to skill up and even make a transition to a different industry of their choice, the plethora of learning resources available, make people feel overwhelmed and unsure about how to get started. We are creating a space where individuals can explore their learning options collectively and plan their respective career path.

Process

The team was brought together by myself. I was looking to work in a team to learn more and also acquire the skill to work in a design team with roles being assigned to people. I was responsible for the user-flow, Information architecture and Visual design.

Research

In our research we wanted to understand how many people changed careers and how many considered changing but never went through. We also wanted to understand the different platforms used by people when transitioning to different careers along with the role of online platforms in providing career information, mentorship, networking, and resources. With that in mind we focused our research on three key questions:-

• What steps do our target users take in order to change careers and how is a ‘final goal’ defined for them?
• What are the different tools our target users already use/have used and what is their experience using them?
• Are there needs that are not yet met and what these may be?

Before sending a survey to recruit participants for interview, we had made some preliminary assumption. They were:-

• Users looking to change career as they identify the skills that we are missing to make the change.
• Majority of the users who tried to change careers are successful.
• User’s ages were between 21 - 30 when they decided to change careers.
• User’s search on platforms like udemy and coursera to purchase courses and start learning.
• Users connect with people on linkedin with the people who are in the industry as to talk to them about the role.
• The number of resources available could cause a hick’s law situation where there are too many options and not sure what to choose and which is good.

Our survey had over 30 responses and the key insights from them were:-

• Majority of people seeking opportunities or in a career transition are between the ages of 22-30 and 30-40.
• All of them have considered switching careers.
• About 50% of them have used various career services, such as coaching, professional websites, and job boards, to help them in their transition.
• 18% of people who used these services found them helpful, with 50% somewhat helpful and the rest not helpful.
• The most commonly used online platforms for job search and career tips are LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, Twitter, Google, Indeed, and Glassdoor.
• 40% of people who used these platforms found them useful, with 44% somewhat helpful and 16% not helpful.
• Expected functions on these platforms include the ability to talk to a mentor, mental guidance, realistic expectations, career path and analysis of existing roles, transition tips to specific industries, and progress tracking.

As the survey results were in, we sent out interview invitations to selected people. While we waited to hear back from them, we chose to do a SWOT analysis on existing products in the market offering solutions to the problem but also understand what is lacking.

We then scheduled interviews with 6 different people ranging from age groups of 21 to 50+. This was key for us to understand at what ages people decided to make a change. What we found was quite interesting and did validate some of our initial assumptions. Key findings were:-

• People use linkedin to try and connect with people
• People mainly make their change between the age group of 21 - 30. Some people make several changes between that age group. 
• People usually just search google for resources and at times have been overwhelmed, confused and unsure of how to proceed.
• They very much appreciate mentorship and focus on gaining that at every stage possible to keep growing.
• None of them have used paid career consulting services with some considering once or twice but not going through with as its expensive.
• They all mentioned that a structured plan to transition would be easier than being left in the ocean without any guidance.
• Most also use such platforms on desktop rather than mobile as well. (This was for us to decide the platform we should focus our product on.)
• The cost that comes into transition and learning was considered a factor for the users as some of the resources were very expensive

From the interviews, we were able to identify the needs and the pain points of the users. They are :-

• The need for communication with like-minded individuals throughout the career change journey and beyond.
• The need for affordable and personalised guidance.
• The need for consistent practice on target skills.
• Support in resume and profile building to prepare for new career applications.

Overall, our research confirmed our assumptions about people during a career change: they are likely to use a relevant product to help them learn, such as online learning platforms like Udemy and Coursera, and may find it challenging to network in a completely unknown career. Our goal is to create a solution that combines community building, personal networking, and knowledge tracking to help people overcome these challenges and succeed in their chosen career paths.

Finding a mentor or coach or somebody who can like, you know, guide me to the right path would be a nice way to start. (Interviewee 1)

I would really like to, to see some people identifying themselves as mentors on LinkedIn. Like, because all connections right now are, are the same. It's like you connect with someone and that's it.(Interviewee 3)

We didn't have, we didn't have a good structure to be able to help you pivot (Interviewee 6)

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Ideation and Design

We essentially started to think on how we can provide a structured learning space for people to learn and at the same time provide a way for people to connect with other individuals and gain mentorship in the process.

There were plenty of ideas on the table and prioritising them was important. . Some of the ideas were:-

• Sharing personal stories to keep authenticity and real challenges faced during transition
• Providing the user with the job expectations and requirements.
• Providing the user with the step by step plan to reach the required skillset.
• Providing the user with valuable courses from different resources and explaining them how it's going to help them

These were just some of the ideas but in the end we finalised on a few of them for the MVP of the product and moved some of them for the next steps. They are:-

• Provide the ability to identify and learn the different terminology of the field that they are transitioning into. 
• Provide different resources such as courses, books, podcasts, articles etc that help them with their career transition. 
• Offer mentoring capabilities free of cost. (Similar to ADPlist)
• Introduce communities where people can join to meet other people going through the same transition as them and learn from each other. 
• Task tracking feature to track their progress with everything to do with the career transition such as course tasks, books, articles read etc.

We then completed the userflows and information architecture. There were multiple iterations of IA's and userflows. In the end we wanted to minimize the number of interactions taken to achieve the target goal. We created userflows for key user paths.

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Once that was done we started to create preliminary wireframes sketches and low fidelity wireframes. We wanted to make sure it we are able to have all the information present so we can do a user testing before moving on to high fidelity design.

Preliminary user testing

We conducted a moderated user testing with two users to try ane help us improve the product and find out if anything was too much. The questions for our preliminary user testing were as follows:-

• Complete the onboarding to our new app, by signing up
• Follow the tutorial on how to set up your first task
• Once you finish, try to complete the third step ('Ask a mentor)
• Finally, try to find a new course to start to improve your career

We got some really interesting insights from the user testing. The results were:-

• Our USP which was the step by step career path was complete missed out by the users
• The task tracking seemed to be too tedious and unnecessary
• Mentorship was very much appreciated but the button to ‘Ask a mentor’ seemed daunting and they felt comfortable talking to other users within the community before going to mentors. 
• Resource section was a bit too overwhelming as well since all the resource filtering. Was suggested to rework that

We then iterated on our product and adjusted the features. We removed the task tracking feature completely and ‘Ask for Advice’ Button. We also restructured the filtering option on all pages including the resource section making it easy in terms of development and easy
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UI Design

We then moved onto designing the high fidelity mockups. We spent some time trying to understand what colors go well and taking multiple references from similar products in the market. Utilizing a strong shade consisting of cool and calm to create an opportunistic mood  felt like the perfect fit for Career fit's branding. The blue helps evoke a happy feeling out of users , and paired with the sky blue gradientit creates a nice balance between calm, energetic and fresh. The main typeface of choice for the app is Poppins. I felt this typeface best strong, bold and conveys information clearly which fits the product. Changing jobs is like swimming in an ocean with strong currents. Creating and setting that mood was key to us.

Outcome

We then did a final user testing with the following questions:-

• Can you please go ahead and signup on the website?
• What do you think about the dashboard?
• Could you please find this particular resource? (UX Research analysis A complete beginner’s guide)
• Can you please view the following mentor’s profile (Miles Carter) and schedule a call?
• Could you please join the following community? (Front-end pals)
• Can you please connect with this person? (Luke Mathews)

The above question covers all the key aspect of our product and will give us an idea of how it functions with users. Our user testing results were as follows:-

• The overall feel of the product is really nice and intuitive.
• User was able to find all the necessary information easily without navigating multiple screens.
• Ability to talk to mentors was really done well especially with the suggestions.
• The left side bar on the dashboard can be extended all the way to the bottom instead of just hovering.