Ed Tech Job Search Tool
Design Manager
Client Project
Ed Tech
Problem
As a design team for an education platform, we were in charge of building a better job search experience for college students about to enter the workforce. To communicate the blue-sky concept to leadership, we built key screens showing possible features in action.
Approach
My team worked with product people to understand the preliminary requirements for a new job search platform, then we built blue-sky screens to showcase what the platform could do. We built our screens around a user persona, and we demonstrated potential interactions and features through the lens of the user’s hypothetical journey through the future-state platform. Our work was used by leadership, to communicate the new product vision, so they could get space on the roadmap and cultivate buy-in for this new product build.
After our work was used in leadership meetings, roadmap allocation was given and we got to dig in deeper to work on a more realistic MVP version of the experience.
Wins
Dedicated time to familiarize ourselves with one core functionality differentiators of our platform: skill and fit assessments.
Took proposed tests ourselves as individuals, mapped potential concerns and opportunities, then met with the team who were responsible for creating and improving the tests to share our findings.
Advocated for different user types and goals, striving to find middle ground that made the new product helpful for both job seekers and companies, without crossing ethical lines.
Prioritized user customization to show results they wanted to companies, rather than serving all data directly to job posting entities without consideration.
Lessons
Product stakeholders who drove the requirements hadn't been a part of the target user group (college students) in over 20 years, yet maintained confidence that they understood the ideal user experience; I would ideally want to find a way get user feedback to incorporate, even if we are only building screens for a proposal.
There was a lot of churn around process. I'd do more to escalate this earlier, to avoid artificially short timelines that impact team well-being.
Explore the prototype
This shows Helly's view of her job search experience as a soon-to-graduate college student.
