🧐 The Problem
Breaking into the UX industry can be daunting for many job seekers due to the highly competitive nature of the field. Newcomers often feel isolated and lack the support system needed to navigate job applications, interviews, and professional growth.
🎯 Goal
To create a social connection feature that enhances positive feelings and fosters a sense of belonging among UX job seekers, simplifying and supporting their transition into the industry.
🙋🏻♀️ 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.
🔑 Key Deliverables
Lo-fi Wireframes for internal team concept testing
Click-through prototypes for research testing
Introduce the concept of tokens
We set out to research how we can utilize the positive psychology of random social connection to help career transitioners and this is what we find out. "Image yourself at a coffee shop, you had a short and friendly conversation with a complete stranger. You get your coffee, you said bye. You went back to your seat feeling AWESOME. Now you're ready to get some work done" -> this is the positive psychology of random social connection.
Key Insights
Interactions with strangers with aligned interest benefit individual wellbeing by creating opportunities for getting good advice and useful information.
Weak ties may have a strong effect on our wellbeing and the relationships need not be deep or long lasting to have a positive impact on health.
The Starbucks experiment: people reported better mood after chatting to baristas vs. those who got assigned to non-interactive baristas.
*Image of Starbucks Experiement*
60 participants
people who socialize with the barista have better mood and sense of belongings than those who don't
people who just simply be as efficient as possible when ordering
After understanding how random social connection can create positive
Design Implementation
Prioritized feature: Social Connection
Include a tag system to help users find people with aligned interests
Create a community: research suggests the richer the mix of different relationships in people's daily conversation, the happier and more satisfied they felt.
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
We deep dive into competitors and aimed to answer the question: How Might We design a 1:1 social connection feature that is safe, feasible, and aides in mental well-being for job seekers.
Chat preferences & scheduling
Text-based chat
Approving Match and Safety
Feature must be a browser extension targeting entry-level tech job seekers.
Provide options for users to easily report inappropriate behavior or content.
The feature should not require users to schedule lengthy meetings; it should be a quick and casual interaction.
Users should be prompted to provide simple feedback after meetings to validate the positive impact
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.