SIM Career App
The Problem
The team started with user research, interviewing 20 users from SIM’s target audience to understand their goals and their feelings towards career planning.
From the insights gathered, I identified 4 types of user personas:
Students and Professionals who had a stronger interest in career planning
Students and Professionals who had a weaker interest in career planning
We discovered that most users did not see career planning as important and they used career portals only transactionally, logging on to look for jobs or upskilling courses as needed.
Mismatch between users' and the organisation's goals
Since users primarily wanted to search for jobs and courses, they would be frustrated if made to do career planning in a way that they felt detracted from their immediate goals.
Solutions
Solution 1: Nudging users towards career planning with CTAs and teasers
To encourage users to do career planning activities, I decided to show them the tangible benefits of career planning via features like skills matches for jobs and use calls-to-action (CTAs) to nudge them toward doing it.
To do this effectively, I first created user flows for job and course searching for each of the 4 personas.
Next, I led the team in analysing these user flows, identifying optimal placements for features and CTAs that drive users toward activities like completing a Skills Assessment.
For example, when a user who had not done the Skills Assessment went to do a job search, they would see a CTA inviting them to do the assessment to see jobs that matched their current skill set.
And once the user had done the Skills Assessment, they would be able to see how well their skills matched the job within each job posting. Otherwise, if they had not done the assessment, they would see another CTA inviting them to do it.
Moreover, to tease the benefits of career planning early, we would deliver insights to users through Lite Profiling as soon as they onboarded. Users could choose to do a quick self-assessment that yielded less detailed but immediate insights on themselves and their career matches.
Solution 2: Gamification
As an added incentive for users to do career planning activities, we also decided to add an element of gamification through collecting badges.
Users would see colorful Profiling Badges appear on their Home Screen as they completed the corresponding activities.
Outcome
After creating an early interactive prototype, I led the team in testing just the job search flow to get a quick sense of whether our solution was working. We found that all users involved engaged with our CTAs and did the Skills Assessment as they did their job search.
Refinement
However, after app onboarding and Lite Profiling were added to our prototype, more testing showed that users thought Lite Profiling was sufficient and tended not to do the full Skills Assessment.
User flow before addition of Lite Profiling. Users would do their Skill Assessment, seeing the full job and skills matches.
User flow after addition of Lite Profiling. Users would skip the full Skill Assessment, seeing only partial job and skills matches.
This drove my decision to change what users saw after completing Lite Profiling. To incentivise them to do the full Skills Assessment, while some insights from Lite Profiling would still be shown, skills matches were removed from job postings and replaced with a CTA to complete the full assessment to unlock the matches.
Final design
The final design took users through a journey of discovering career planning.
Results and reflections
As I had decided to adopt Lean and Agile practices, including testing our solutions early, we were able to complete the project efficiently within 4 months. The client was also happy with how we brought to life their vision of bringing career planning to users, with 90% of users doing the activities during our final round of testing.
However, developer handoff was deprioritised as our agency did not end up winning the development part of the contract. Handoff was handled mainly through a presentation deck, with no assurance that the developers would be able to implement our designs.
Looking back, consolidating the user stories I had written during the design sprints into a proper handoff document would have better supported future development.
