1 Mentor
A startup providing institutions with data-driven recommendations on skills, tools and knowledge required by industries to enhance programs and student career guidance.
The goal for this platform was to help their users see the labor market trends versus what their students should be learning to obtain a job. My team and I were initially promised to have a handful of target users to test on to begin this project, but it never materialized. The redesign (located on the right) is based on the information provided by the company and what we could gather on our own. The original platform interface is located above this text on the left.
I took part in researching, sketching, wire-framing and prototyping, personas and data analysis.
Redesigned the administrator platform to improve user engagement and retention. Identified areas with risk for user drop-off and optimized the user’s flow inside the platform.
Due to the strict scope and timeline of 5 weeks, our team's design challenge is loosely based off of a design sprint.
1st Round
Research.
Based off of the resources and information given by 1Mentor stakeholders, my team and I identified two possible personas catered to those who would utilize the administrator platform most effectively. We chose this method since we were unable to interview the active advisors using the platform, this helped us keep in mind these advisors as we continued to redesign.
Usability Testing.
Participant 1
Too much information are being presented; may overwhelm students
Rank order is not helpful since job requirements are complex
Categories are too broad (in reference to Top Work Requirements)
As a platform, more specific information would be useful and stand out more as a tool
“Just because you know that’s what most people do, if you’re not in that situation, the trajectory is not open to you in that sense.”
In reference to the question of how this person would use the platform to help students understand the job market in their major
Participant 2
Would like to include diversity in job info (not just white collar jobs)
Would like the Skill Set spider graph to relate to info above it
Rewording “recommendation” to “potential,” “suggested,” or “possible pathways” may sound better
This platform is considered a big infographic, would be cool if it was more interactive
Connecting to mentors, applying to job postings, being more accessible
Give users a purpose to come back to the platform to utilize
“Daniel wants more.”
At the start of this project, 1Mentor asked to test the current design of the administrator platform. However, there was a roadblock in recruiting participants for this test. The potential candidates were not able to respond in accordance to the timeline that was planned. Therefore, in order to be able to get any source of data that would help back up our design, one of my teammates were able to reach out to their connections. Although these users were not administrators at a university, both of them still has relatable experience and background under administration or education.
Before sketching we wanted to make sure we were answering the pain points that our participants had in the interview with Mentor1 current design of their site.
How might we help admins compare student’s skills to the career they desire?
How might we link students to the job they want?
How might we show students they are meeting the requirements in the industry they’re aiming towards?
Sketches Part 1
Our stakeholders also mentioned to us that they wanted to add an extra feature where admins are able to access student profiles as well as job postings. They want these features to further help admins be well prepared to help their students. After my team and I analyzed the user interview insights as well as taking our stakeholder's proposals into consideration, we each did a round of crazy 8's. We sketched out a solution that would help solve some pain points that were mentioned in the user interviews. All of us did 8 sketches for each tab from the platform (Home, Skill Insights, Occupation Insight). This will then be evaluated for the most efficient design and layout.
Wireframes Part 1
1Mentor proposed the idea to combine both Labor Insight and Skill Insights features into a single dashboard. These sketches reflecting on those feedbacks are as follows:
Occupations of interest + skill match
Occupation recommendations (based on skill and based on major)
Complete skill set
Skills in progress
Recommend specific job postings
based on their skill set
based on their occupations of interest
based on companies of interest
Course recommendations
A filter that would let admins to search for a faculty, a major, or a specific student name
The feedback we received from the stakeholders gave us a chance to relook at what we could do better in terms of communication and understanding the project. The scope of the project changed even further.
Functionality not available for certain elements proposed
Designs not consistent with previously available information
Two users was not enough to form reliable conclusion
Our new objective: Design a new page for administrators to view student platform information.
2nd Round
Sketching Part 2
Similar to the first round of sketching, my team and I picked out the features from each that would work best as a solution. This includes the layout for the main student profile, skill kanban board, and drop-down filters. For Occupation Prospects, will be used to show matched skills between students and a particular job position. This would help admins guide students on what skills they may need to work on. Lastly, adding sub-tabs to better organize content and utilizing chips to organize skills this would help the design become more visually appealing to the user and would help them digest information quickly.
Wire-framing Part 2
In the earlier wireframe, there was a suggestion to our stakeholders the idea of incorporating more tabs in order to better digest content. However, due to the limited timeline and scope of this project, our stakeholders just had us add a fourth tab (Student Advising) and to focus on design that page and its features.
These second wireframes before the final deliverable Mock-ups, we used components 1Mentor had already provided us. The only components that we created from scratch was be the Kanban board, new filtering menu, and the interests section.
Hi- Fidelity Mock Up:
Student Profile Tab
Our final deliverable for 1Mentor is a high fidelity mock-up of the Student Advising tab. Within this tab has three sub-tabs governing over Student Profile, Explore Jobs, and Explore Skills.
These features of Student Advising will have the following:
Student Profile
Advance filters with individual student search
Occupation, Company, and Industry of Interest
Skill Kanban board
Occupation Objectives
Hi- Fidelity Mock Up:
Explore Jobs
Advance filtering by occupation, companies, industry, and city
List of interests curated by the students (before they completed their profile) along with highlighted jobs that matches their current skills
Modal pop-up showcasing skills required after clicking on a job
Hi- Fidelity Mock Up:
Explore Skills
Explore Skills
Advance filter choices similar to Explore Jobs with an additional feature of tag clouds (being able to select more than one skill to view)
Stat preview of skills shown in results
Modal pop-up showcasing courses in relation to that skill.
In Conclusion
1Mentor partners with colleges and universities to help administrators and their students understand how the labor market is evolving. Their data and resources help prepare students with the right skills and tools that are required and expected from employers. Their clients are now able to view 1Mentor’s student advising tab with less confusion on where to locate the correct tools to assist the students needs when it’s regarding job searching and gaining more skills for the work force.
Next Iterations:
The next phase of this would be to find target users and conduct a usability test to identify the users needs, as we didn’t have the access to do so during this phase.
Some challenges came about however, I am absolutely grateful to have this design experience with an amazing start-up company, such as 1Mentor. I definitely had a taste of what it was like accustoming myself when plans don't go accordingly. The biggest set back for my team and I was definitely recruiting participants for the usability testing. However, I'm blessed to have a wonderful team that didn't falter to that minor hiccup. We still found a way to persevere and did our best to follow through redesigning the admin platform as promised. Ideally, if we had more time I would have liked to conduct a usability test on their prior platform with their ideal users then come up with a metric, so we can better analyze the data on the redesign. Being able to exercise our designs through usability testing (before and after) could help validate its credibility.
Nevertheless, regarding the minor setbacks as far as conducting usability testing and the time restrictions that were faced, as an ambitious UX Designer, I think these road bumps help improve my critical thinking and design skills.
I appreciated my teams different ways they approached problems and collaborated together. I learned from them one way to collaborate with stakeholders and how to present and defend our designs to a client.
This experience gave me valuable insight into what it takes to work with a team with different moving parts in a fast-paced environment.