Overview 

Timeframe: 4 week-long sprints     

Tools: Axure, Sketch, Keynote   

Role: User experience (UX) research, content strategy, product design

My team of 3 UX designers was tasked with discovering job search challenges specific to Designation bootcamp graduates and creating a digital tool to facilitate a structured and productive search. We designed an all-in-one platform for keeping track of applications, dates, networking events, and relevant contacts so grads would know when to follow up and where to focus their efforts. A panel of industry experts selected my team's design out of four to continue through to visual design. 

01. The Challenge

There are many tools for job seekers today, including numerous job boards and organizational tools. However, there is no interface specifically for design bootcamp graduates to keep track of their job hunt while communicating with their career mentors and counselors. The goal of this project was to create a digital product to streamline the job application process of bootcamp graduates that:  

• Keeps engagement central

• Makes documentation and tracking easy

• Meets the needs of both job seekers and their counselors

02. Our Approach

Look at the landscape

talk to users

We initially spoke with four graduates to better understand their needs.

Key takeaways

Graduates struggled with a sudden lack of structure after Designation.

“It was hard to keep that structure [of Designation] in my life. There were days when I didn’t get a lot done.” — Graduate

Graduates are duplicating their efforts to update counselors about their job hunt.

“It’s not easy for Mike to get a week-by-week for what I’ve done just by looking at my Huntr board.” — Graduate

Networking is important to graduates.

“Networking is a tool. It can be cumbersome and overwhelming, but it’s an important part of the process.” — Graduate

define the problem

Initial problem statement:

Overwhelmed Designation grads need a digital tool to prioritize and be held accountable for the tasks they need to complete for their job search or else they will lose momentum and prolong their job hunt process.

03. Initial Exploration

Personas

Journey Map

Design Principles

We showed our initial concepts to 5 Designation graduates.

Concept 1: Automated tasks

• Grads cared more about following up on jobs than the tasks we addressed in this concept.

Concept 2: Gamification

• Grads didn’t want to add additional competition to an already competitive process but liked some of the social aspects.

Concept 3: Counselor visibility

• Grads felt knowing their counselor could see their job tracking efforts would keep them accountable. They also appreciated the idea of being able to message their counselor within the app where everything they’d need to talk about would be, instead of separately via email.

04. A Turning Point

Rethink the problem

We learned during concept testing that graduates were struggling to organize dates and contacts relevant to their job applications. We also heard that even though they know how important networking is, graduates aren’t always aware of events going on and they might be too intimidated or unmotivated to attend them alone. After repeatedly hearing these concerns during interviews, we knew we had to pivot and revise our focus.

“It’s nice to keep each other accountable by forcing each other to go to networking events and meet people.” — Graduate

New problem statement:

Overwhelmed Designation grads need a digital tool to help them organize both their job search and networking information so they know when to follow up and where to focus their efforts.

05. Our Solution

06. Final Thoughts

This project was a humbling exercise in failing fast. Since we had just a few weeks to do background research,  conduct multiple rounds of interviews, and iterate on our designs, my team felt thrown for a loop when we had to pivot more than halfway through the project.  We realized that what we had initially identified as the primary pain point for users turned out not to be so important. While everyone had to juggle job hunt tasks and indeed felt it was a lot to manage, people had the most anxiety about coordinating networking efforts on top of everything else. Instead of being attached to our stickies and well thought out ideas, we had to “kill our darlings” and honor what was going to best serve our users.