🧐 The Problem
Breaking into the tech industry can be incredibly stressful. The market is fiercely competitive, and it's taking a toll on job seekers' mental wellbeing.
🎯 Goal
In phase 1 of our project, we explore ideas around a product that provides thoughtful guidance and holistic support for job-seeking individual's mental well-being each step of the way.
🙋🏻♀️ My Role & Method Used
As a UX Designer on a founding team, I worked with researchers & project managers. The project was approached with an Agile mindset across 4 sprints.
Design Research Liaison
Promoted cross-functional collaboration
Facilitated Ask Me Anything (AMA) workshop with the research team
Notion Manager
Organized and kept tack of meeting agendas, weekly tasks, and design hand-off documents
DEMO
Demo Presenter
Presented design insights to clients during demos
🔑 Key Deliverables
Collaboration workshops to explore and establish design pathways, branding to produce low-mid fidelity wire-flows and responsive designs scoped by research.
A product vision statement, feature specifications are documented in the form of product requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, and UX deliverables.
UX deliverables that the team creates, including user task flows, user stories, personas, user journeys, etc.
Research and testing insights/recommendations from continuous discovery. Including competitive analysis, surveys, and personas.
Recommendations for the client and product team to continue work in future phase.
In the beginning, we knew that our clients envisioned a product that supports job seekers & career switchers by providing guidance for their mental wellbeing. But is it going to be a job search app for mental health? Or a mental health app for job search? How do we combine the two elements together?
To understand the problem better, our Research Team delved into articles and research papers to understand the prevalence of mental health challenges among job seekers.
Key Insights
Career changes negatively impact mental health, self-esteem, and family dynamics
Longer job search periods are associated with exhaustion and decreased effectiveness
Reducing job-seeking stress and increasing social support are crucial
We look at current apps on the market that focus on mental health and job-seeking activity to identify common features and themes.
Community & support
Mental health resource
Emotional wellbeing
Job-related support
Positive environment
Goal setting and achievement
Ambience and relaxation
Goal
To map out the demographic of our potential users
Understand users' job search activities and mental health status
Identify the type of app users want the most
Explore factors correlated with job seeker's mental health status
Examine app use preferences of different groups of people
Methodology
Survey
Designed on Google Doc, then released to the TechFleet General Assembly & larger crowd as Google Form.
Data
Distribution analysis & cross-tabulation analysis
Gender
Male
Female
A NEW DIRECTION
PIVOT
To Sum Up from Personas:
Almost all job seekers struggle with finding entry-level job openings.
It is hard to build relevant experience during career transition: a career switcher in their 40s will be competing with primarily younger professionals.
Elephants
Represent honor, stability, strength, patience, and good fortune.
Also symbolize health and happiness, and are thought to promote spiritual wellbeing in our daily lives.
Phoenixes
A mythical bird that rises from its ashes
Phoenix symbolizes rebirth, renewal, and resilience in the face of destruction.
Goal
As a user, Eva wants to select a goal and create a list of tasks to practice her Figma knowledge, so that she can brush up on her UI skills and ultimately find a job in tech.
Acceptance Criteria
A dashboard view of ongoing goals to track progress.
A list of goals to search from and add to the personal dashboard.
The option to update a goal status.
User Flow
Having a clear sense of what our users' goals and the acceptance criteria are, we started to create some user flows of a user selecting a goal and creating an action plan.
After gathering all the information we had, the team started visualizing the explored ideas and creating sketches and wireframes.
Users' needs
A user needs to select one or multiple goals from their choice of category, and add them to their personal dashboard.
Results
We break down the goals into the following 4 different categories: sharpening skills, job application, networking, and mental health & selfcare. From there, we created sketches and lo-fi wireframes to visualize the process of the users selecting a goal to achieve.
Users' needs
After adding some goals they would like to achieve, a user also needs a personal dashboard for them to keep track of their progress.
Results
We created a few different designs to help us envision what a personal dashboard would look like for our users.
Overall Direction
People rarely use mental health apps and prefer job-seeking apps, therefore our app should prioritize job searching & emphasize mental health
Users' Current Job Search Activities & Habit
Almost everyone uses LinkedIn and they use it for job applications
Most users have been job searching for 0-6 months
Mental Health Status
Most users think talking with peers and goal tracking are helpful in their journey of pursuing professional goals
Those who spend 2 or fewer hours on job-seeking apps report better mental health status
UX Focus Competitive Analysis
Onboarding screens need to have a balance between too many questions and finding enough info for personalization
Mood Boards
Characters: the emotional effects on app users can be profound
Research
Job seekers don't really use that much mental health apps (reasons for pivoting)
User Personas
Different backgrounds, common problems
Difficulty of finding a job based on background
And that's a wrap!
It was truly an exciting journey from the beginning to the end of AmpUp Phase 1. Being part of this founding team and having the privilege to shape the direction of the product, I have the unique opportunity to experience what it’s like to work in a start-up environment. There’s undoubtedly a lot of uncertainty (and sometimes being overwhelming), but with that, it’s also a lot of passionate energy, exploration, and bouncing off creative ideas. It’s jumping in with a leap of faith, and that creates such a memorable experience.
Meet the team
Working with everyone to uncover each other's working & communication styles, and gradually building a system in which everybody thrives, has been an amazing journey.