Career Bridgers
A mobile app designed to help students get ahead in their careers.
Career Bridgers aims to offers courses along with freelancing projects so that students can learn, get work experience, and make money at the same time.
Challenge
The idea of Career Bridgers surfaced while talking to a few online learners who expressed that although they are eager to learn and get ahead in their careers, they often find it difficult to complete their courses. Many online courses offer abundance of learning material, but students tend to find it hard to feel a sense of purpose without any applied knowledge, leading to the abandonment of the entire course before completion.
How might we make learners feel proud of what they have accomplished at the end of a course?
Objective
Design a mobile app that allows students to work in jobs that coincides with the skills they are developing in their program.
Design a digital experience that is easy and delightful to use
Researching the problem space
There are numerous online learning resources that help individuals learn skills to further their career development. But majority of courses are not completed.
Research Goals
What makes a fulfilling online learning experience
What motivates them to complete a course
Why they’ve stopped the learning in the past
Interviewing users on their online learning experiences
“What causes someone to abandon an online course?” to answer this question, I conducted several interviews via Google Meet to learn about:
How an online course fits into their daily life and overall career objectives
How they prioritize their to dos
User interviews revealed two key insights:
Don’t see an immediate return in the learning
Users will prioritize activities in their day that has an immediate return in their career advancement. This makes it hard to dedicate themselves to an on going self directing learning course.
Lose motivation when there’s no applied knowledge
The course material becomes boring when the student isn’t able to apply their learning in real life projects.
“I enjoy learning, but I need something that will hold me accountable and that will allow me to have proven applied knowledge at the end of the course.” -M
User interview research shows that the average completion rate of online courses is as low as 3%
Building user empathy
The user interviews gave me a better understanding of who the users were and how they might use an online learning app. I focused on expanding those findings into concrete visualizations that would help me empathize with users and define the product.
Persona Development
Based on patterns from my user insights I developed two personas - a life style entrepreneur and aesthetician who is eager to continuously develop their skills through various self directing online learning and be able to apply their knowledge with engaging clients
“I would like to have proven applied knowledge by the end of a course, because credentials alone are not enough of a reward” -T
Design and Prototype
A linear approach was used in the design process. Given the limited time constraints, I extracted the main findings from my interviews and implemented features that had the highest priority. Career Bridgers’ main objective would be to allow users to find real work experience in relation to the skills that they are learning in their online courses.
Main app features that will help achieve this objective:
Search a job on the catalog or through a search function
Apply for the job
Submit deliverables for the job
Mid-Fidelity Wireframes
Key screens that will support these features:
Dashboard
Job catalog
Specific job detail screen
Using color and balance to portray Career Bridger’s brand values
Focusing on a light violet that portrays light heartedness with a contemporary feel, while projecting quality and trustworthiness. The ivory creates a harmonious counter balance to complement the violet.
Test and iterate
Five moderated usability tests were conducted through Google Meet. The objective of the test is to assess Career Bridger’s overall usability and effectiveness, to identify obstacles to completing vital tasks, overall pain points, and to identify participants’ impressions of using the product to complete key tasks.
Research Questions
How successfully are users able to find a specific job and sign up for it?
How do users feel about the amount of time and steps required to go through signing up and submitting a deliverable?
What steps do users take when searching for a job?
Tasks to Test:
Search for a job
Apply to a job
Submit a deliverable to a client
Challenges with testing:
The dashboard is more complicated than I imagined. Because it is such a central hub for many interactions, it had more room for differing interpretations.
There were very differing interpretations for the summary navigation on the dashboard.
Many didn’t think the summary navigation was clickable.
Once users clicked on the right button from the dashboard, the flows were very straight forward to every user.
Simplifying the naming conventions of key navigation buttons on the dashboard, here are the revisions:
Revisions and final wireframes
Original dashboard
Revised dashboard
Project Reflection
User testing shows that people like to feel a sense of familiarity and predictability. Users tend to prefer visual elements and written content that is presented with clarity and elements that they can recognize. The dashboard would need further testing before solidifying into higher fidelity. Priority should be put on items where there are completely different interpretations among users.
Next steps:
Test the main usage of the dashboard - card sorting activity for just the dashboard to get the best naming conventions and visual design choices
Linking skills learned in their courses to the job experience that they are applying for
Conduct additional interview to find out ways to bridge what the user is learning to the work experience in order to get the most satisfaction out of a learning journey
Conclusion:
While there are many factors that impact users’ satisfaction in their online learning journey, Career Bridgers can address the main issue driving low completion rates. By offering real job experience alongside their studies, students would be more inclined to continue their courses until the end.