Career Companion

Career Guidance & E-learning platform

About

Career Companion is an initiative to empower underprivileged women in India by providing them career guidance for choosing and pursuing a career of their interest, and also helping them learn through online courses from well-recognized education partners across the world.

Responsive website | Android application
Globant, India
Nov 2015 - June 2017

Client name and project name is modified, details of the project are omitted due to NDA constraints.

My Role & Responsibilities

User Experience Designer

Conceptualizing, information architecture, designing user-flow, designing wireframes for responsive web and Android application, creating click-through prototypes in Axure RP, and providing development-support.

Team

1 Design Lead, 2 UX Designers, 2 Visual Designers, 18 Developers, 2 Technical & 2 Project Managers

Problem background

Only 30% of women between the age of 15-64 years in India work in recognized industries, primarily due to insufficient access to education.

Understanding user needs

Contextual Inquiry
Placeholder image
9 Cities . 36 Women

We conducted in-person interviews to get insights into the user needs, behavioral pattern, their daily routine, device usage, the perception of the internet, means of formal and informal education, motivating factors and people that influence their career-related decisions.

Research Analysis
Placeholder image

The observations from the field research were transferred to post-it notes and reviewed to find patterns based on similarities in the content. This affinity-mapping resulted in the insights which helped in understanding the target audience, their attitude, and behavior around education and career.

Target Audience

User research and analysis helped us get a better understanding of our target audience.

Icon for Semi-urban area

Rural or semi-urban areas

Icon for english fluency

Low educational background, less fluent in English

Icon for budget devices

Budget devices having limited internal storage

Icon for limited connectivity

Limited connectivity slow internet speed

 
Key Personas

From our user research and analysis, we defined 3 persons to further aid our design process

persona
Career Accelerators

Look for returns on investments & quick enhancements. Take calculative decisions.

Goal:

To enhance current knowledge and accelerate a career

persona thumbnail 1
Closet Dreamers

Have off-beat career choices, need information to validate and negotiate with family.

Goal:

To get guidance and support for off-beat career paths

persona thumbnail 1
Backup Schemers

Has an end goal but is flexible about the paths, as long as she reaches her career goal.

Goal:

To get guidance on career choices for reaching her goal

Design Brief

How might we guide women for choosing and pursuing a career of their interest and also provide them with ways for developing their knowledge & skills for supplementing their academic study.

Initial concepts & Concept testing

Initial Concepts

Based on the personas, we developed 3 approaches catering to the different user intents in order to get some early feedback on the design direction.

Concept-testing
Placeholder image
3 Cities . 12 Women

Through this initial concept- testing, we tried to understand if the need gap is being addressed by the initial product concept. We tried to also get insights into users’ reactions to the concept, desirability, and usability of the concepts.

Designing user experience

Based on the learnings from initial concept-testing, we started defining and designing the user experience for our platform.

wireframing
Wireframing
war-room
Design-development collaboration

While crafting the user experience, we used personas to remind ourselves about the user needs & expectations. Having the user at the heart of the project helped design and development team to be on the same page.

Definining Platform Structure

1

Inform + Impress + Engage her
homepage Homepage

2

Understand her
career-guide Ask interests and constraints

3

Guide her but let her choose
recommendations Career recommendations based on interests

4

Handholding
Placeholder image Personalised dashboard

Wireframes

Responsive Website

60+

Unique Screens
Along with multiple states, use-cases, and micro-interactions

wireframes-collage
 
Android Application

70+

Unique Screens
Along with multiple states, use-cases, and micro-interactions

wireframes-collage
 

Design-Development Collaboration

Interactive Prototype
wireframes-collage
Design Specs + Documentation
wireframes-collage

I worked closely with the development team to understand the constraints and work-out a solution that works best for the users and the business

Key Features

Home Page
wireframes-collage
Career Guidance
wireframes-collage
Career Test
wireframes-collage
Career Path
key-features
Courses
key-features
Impact

2,00,000

User accounts were created by 2017
and still counting…

What I learned

Designing from scratch is better but more challenging than redesigning.

As I was involved in the project right from the beginning until after it was launched, I got to experience the entire project life-cycle.

Aggregate. Curate. Design

I got an opportunity to be a part of a process where we identified the course partners, content partners, the career guidance partners and curate their content to create a consistent experience that addresses the user needs.

The importance of Design and development team collaboration

The most appreciated aspect of this project was the nature of the collaboration between design and development teams. The development team was involved in the design process right from the beginning, which helped everyone from the team empathize with the users and contribute towards creating the tailored experience for the target user.

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