Checkd: One platform for career-related events
Cheerfully Solved BY Design: The Checkd mobile app displays all career-related events (in-house days, meet and greet, workshops, masterclasses, business cases, fairs). Its aim is to encourage students to make informed career decisions, and provide a platform for professionals and career switchers by creating a better understanding of companies, industries and the different kinds of jobs.
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs
Background
I was checking job vacancies when I stumbled upon a digital marketing traineeship. I saw on the website of the company that they were hosting an in-house day soon where they would present the traineeships and also hold a digital tooling workshop to give a better impression of what to expect from the traineeship. ‘A small look into the kitchen’, nice I thought and applied for it. I loved the experience, even though I soon realised that digital marketing is not the path that I would like to take. And I imagined how great it would be to attend more of these events to get a proper impression of potential career prospects. From here on, my thoughts wandered towards the main pain points. My pain points were indecisiveness and inertia. Thus, basically, I focused on the question: “How to solve the problem of indecisiveness regarding career choices?”
Understanding the problem
First thing first, since I knew that demand validation is an important step in the process of any new idea, I shared my idea with my friends and they reacted positively. So I started to schedule interviews with friends, peers, colleagues who were making part of the target group to thoroughly understand the problem. I had in total 6 interviews. Not only were my pain points validated, I also found some other interesting insights:
Insight 1
No matter in which stage you’re in, if you haven’t made the right career choices, you’ll continue the search
Insight 2
Students are dealing with inertia
Insight 3
Career switchers want to have a thorough understanding before taking a step into career transition
Insight 4
Professionals are interested in what’s going on in the industry and best practices
Analysis & Synthesis
Following this, I created three user personas: a student, a professional and a career switcher. The personas enabled me to understand the goals and motivations better and also provided nice foundation for the user journeys. Although, the personas might seem close to each other, there are different goals and motivations and these became apparent in the user journeys. Mapping the user journey gave a better understanding about for example how a student has to be aware of a certain event, whereas a career switcher has already a mindset to be researching events. Or whereas students and career switchers want some more practical information about careers, professionals are more interested in the business side and networking. So they have to be approached differently.
“As a career switcher, I want to discover options, so that I can focus on what is attainable”
“As a student, I want to learn more about different job titles, so that I can make informed decisions”
“As a professional, I want to learn about other companies’ work, so that I can grow my network and apply it to my own work.”
Problem Statement
Based on the insights gained from the user personas and journeys, I defined the problem statement as follows:
Highly educated people (students, professionals and career switchers) are frustrated with the time spent on indecisiveness and inertia regarding career choices, since there are too many job titles, what’s learned in college doesn’t match business and they don’t know what’s the most suitable career path to take.
Designing MVP
From what I defined and understood, I started generating some ideas that could solve the problems. The overall offer of career-related events is not clear nor organised. Universities provide their own events/apps, but this not all what is out there. Organised by Study Associations, which involves selection. For students, these events are most likely the first connection point with the business. Being exposed to more events, companies, people, increases the probability of making informed decisions about the future and having a clear vision. The translation of these needs into design decisions means providing a platform, which displays career-related events for defined users.
Based on the problem statement, I started thinking of what the app should provide. I decided for a mobile app, since it is easier to access and everyone in the interviews was preferring mobile usage over desktop. I spent an awful lot of time on the log in/sign up screens, since it was my first time designing an app. I checked several apps in the process to see what would work for my app Checkd. (This name suddenly popped up in my mind, “Have you checkd out that event?” “You checkd this!” “Let’s checkd!”)
I sketched their wireframes on paper and eventually came up with mine:
After I was satisfied with these I decided it was time to have computerised low fidelity wireframes. Ok, I also wanted to try out Balsamiq. And I loved it! I wish I didn’t spend time and paper and directly used Balsamiq after deciding what to have on each screen (e.g. information architecture).
Testing & Iterations
Now my low fidelity wireframes were done and looked nice, I wanted to test them with real users, checking whether the user flow made sense. I received constructive feedback and made some tweaks on the main navigation tabs, labels and order on the event page, adding keywords on profile page, applying and sharing on the home page.
High fidelity iterations
My final goal was the visual design of the app. Again, there were a lot of iterations in this phase as well. I had to choose on the colour scheme, fonts and sizes. Eventually, I chose mainly green tints to emphasise growth and development.
Final results
Next Steps & Key Takeaways
This project was undertaken from the demand side. Obviously, there is also the supply side. The next step would be to understand the companies and how this app could satisfy their needs.
I learned a lot by doing this project. It was my first UX design project and there are some key takeaways:
1. While doing the interviews, I felt like an octopus: I was observing, listening, asking questions and taking notes. It wasn’t an easy task, and I realised the importance and ease of recording interviews!
2. Another point for my development is the time I spent on designing the sign up screens. I wanted to start from the start, and wasted a bit too much time on it.
3. Testing in earlier stage is very useful. What I think I did well in this project is acknowledging that iteration is an important part of design thinking, I quickly moved on with the wireframes, tested it and re-iterated and this went on and on. Quite enjoyable to see improvements!
4. Research is important, customer personas, and user journeys makes it much easier to empathise and understand the needs and motivations of users. Very interesting to realise this and I enjoyed it a lot.
