Scope

October—December 2020

Team

Alissa RubiN
Meenal Jakatdar
Blair Morgan Reeves
Reno PeRry

Key Skills

User research
Information Architecture
UX/Ui Design
Design Leadership

wiseful is a platform that connects early career job seekers with experienced professionals for job mentoring within tech. The company’s mission is particularly focused on helping underrepresented groups and first-generation professionals break into tech.

In the fall of 2020, the wiseful website was still in its beta form, with a single primary feature: allowing users to view mentors’ profiles and availability, and schedule a video call with them. I was brought on as design lead for three months along with two junior designers to guide the team through a series of design sprints to reimagine a more mature version of the platform.

Why do some users sign up, but never schedule calls?

The Focus Problem

The design focus given to the team as we started was, why are some users signing up, but not scheduling calls? Every service wants to increase conversions, so this was a familiar problem. It was also an ideal opportunity to uncover core needs of wiseful’s users, and to build up the the platform based on research findings.

Contents

I worked remotely with two junior designers and the wiseful CEO to conduct user research and design new features for the website. My contributions included:

• Recruiting and conducting exploratory interviews

• Research synthesis

• Creating journey maps and other design documents

• Iterating designs with team

• Detailing site interactions and logic

• Auditing website copy and UI; creating a new navigation system, editing copy

• Engaging in product management

• Establishing team alignment, mentorship and critiques with junior designers

We designed collaboratively in Figma, while using Notion for project management documentation. Other tools included Bubble, Miro, Slack, Google Suite, Zoom, and Calendly.

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We kicked off a 4-week design sprint with two weeks of research, and interviewed 10 job seekers who had not moved forward with scheduling any mentorship calls since signing up for the wiseful platform.

Initially we had a larger response from men than women on the platform, and refocused our recruiting efforts to make sure our research was more inclusive.

“After a while you start to wonder, what am I really missing here?” —frustrated job seeker

Key Findings from job seekers

• Trust and personal connection
  Often, users discovered the platform through wiseful founder Reno Perry’s LinkedIn content, and felt a high level of trust and connection through his posts; the website did not follow through on this feeling, and the sense of personal connection disappeared. Users often asked, ‘Who are these Insiders? What can they offer me?’ Rather than having a window into mentors’ expertise and personality, users felt they were scanning through sales pitches.

• Value in shared experiences
  Many users were hesitant to book a call unless they could see how a mentor would be able to speak directly to their experience. The platform promises personalized career advice, and users wanted the mentors to share similar life experiences—and often job titles and backgrounds—that would make them the perfect guide on their career journey. However mentor profiles focused more on education and company, and were inconsistent in what details mentors added to them.

• Seeing a roadmap to landing a new job
  Users often described the missing piece of their job-hunt toolkit as a lack of direction, guidance, and ability to learn from those who have already struggled through the same experiences. They described the concept of wiseful as the ideal tool for them. However, once on the platform, they sometimes felt like they could no longer see a direct path from receiving mentorship through wiseful to landing a job. They might have become lost in a number of not-quite-perfect mentor choices, or felt overwhelmed by the gap between where they were, and where they wanted to be.

• Detail and clarity, robustness of platform
  There were a number of recurring questions about how the platform works—do mentors need to approve my meeting request?—as well as requests, such as for more granular filters. Technical challenges also surfaced repeatedly, and contributed to eroded trust on the platform or a reduction in usefulness: front-end bugs, a lack of robust UI design, and sometimes simply a lack of relevant mentors in the job seeker’s field.

"How can I know who I’m talking to before I commit the money and book a call?"

The Mentor side of the platform

As we began to synthesis our research findings, it became crucial to learn more about the mentor side of the platform, and understand how much we could ask of mentors (also called wiseful Insiders) as we considered ways to reshape the platform. This additional research had not been in our original timeline, so we multitasked, conducting further interviews as we began to explore design strategy and concepts.

In our 5 mentor interviews we began to learn for the first time exactly how mentors interacted with the website, their motivations, and what might improve their experience on the platform.

How might we enable mentors and job seekers to get the most out of their time together?

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Crucial to our design strategy moving forward, we learned that mentors spent a significant amount of time preparing for calls by looking at LinkedIn profiles and trying to find resumés posted online; meeting time was often eaten up by establishing basic needs of the job seeker and reviewing resumés and other documents for the first time.

Although some of this crucial info was collected from job seekers during onboarding, there was no mechanism to share it with mentors. We learned that Reno did a lot of manual work sharing contact information, mentorship needs, promoting new mentors on the platform and even connecting job seekers with good matches.

Additionally, we learned that mentors were experiencing a range of frequent technical glitches with video meetings, and often set up work-arounds such as communicating through texting to reschedule or holding meetings over the phone.

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After each interview, we would often discuss and summarize key findings. When we completed each round of interviews, we used Miro to synthesize findings, organize and prioritize common themes, and pull insights from these.

We developed “how might we” statements as we pivoted to thinking about solutions, and held a group digital brainstorming session where we ideated on our insights, grouped similar concepts, and dot-voted on our top concepts.

This ideation and subsequent narrowing down closed out the final week of our design sprint.

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After finishing up our kick-off sprint with concepts in hand, we focused on building out the UI of screens and features. Driven by our “how might we” questions, we focused our design initiatives on three major areas:

• Screens:

  • Mentor profiles: provide more relevant details and maintain a consistent style

  • Dashboard: create a space for users to track their job hunt journey, see details of calls with insiders, and edit their personal information to be shared with their mentors

  • Call scheduler: update the modal for scheduling a call with a mentor, so that a job seeker can add notes and documents that will help the mentor prepare

• Information architecture: how should content on the site be organized to create meaning and clarity for users, and guide them through key tasks

• Bugs, minor UI/copy fixes, and filters: improve usability and understanding of the platform, and granularity of filters

With our short time working together, we focused on three key screens and site IA.

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Because of the short timeline for our collaboration together, we focused primarily on the job seeker side of the platform.

We began by sketching out our three primary screens—job seeker dashboard, mentor profile cards, and call scheduling modal—with as many ideas as possible. This was a useful first step in fleshing out site needs, repeatable UI patterns, and task flows, and improving upon the best layouts before getting digital.

Auditing the site

Before going digital with our wireframes, we needed to align the existing website’s UI styles with our needs going forward. wiseful had a few existing visual design assets, however, no design system or UI style guide existed. In order to give our team a foundation from which to start developing designs, I conducted a design and content audit of the existing website.

The purpose of the content audit was to track what information (written copy) lived where. Basically, we wanted to answer the question, “what information do users need to use the platform, and where will they encounter it?” I also mapped the site’s information architecture through this process. This audit turned up a number of typos and grammatical errors, as well as opportunities to for clearer communication.

To give our team a foundation to work from, I conducted a design and content audit of the existing website.

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For the design audit, I grabbed every example on the site of different elements: fonts, background colors, modals, navigation, headers and footers, cards, calendars, graphic flourishes, and interaction patterns (hover states, animations). We discovered there were dozens of different font stylings for headings and body copy, inconsistent column widths and spacing, many button sizes, varying corner radii and drop shadows, and other elements that could benefit from the consistency that even a rudimentary design system can lend.

After this audit, I used the code-free site-building tool Bubble, on which the platform had been built, to make a number of quick immediate fixes to copy, alignment and spacing, and font styles across public-facing pages of the site that we were not focusing on in our designs.

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With the audits complete, our team was able to clean up some of the site styles and lay out the basics of a design system; we worked to follow best practices for digital accessibility, particularly in terms of color contrast and readability.

As we sketched out primary screens and the needs of the site came into focus, I developed a new information architecture and navigation for the job-seeker side of the platform, accounting for a gradual rollout of features. I considered how the navigation and overall IA could be structured to work well for both a near-term version of the site, and be ready to incorporate more features down the line.

Before

After

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While creating layouts, we made sure to build them for both a new-user state where very little information was present, as well as an advanced-user state. This was most important on the dashboard page; we wanted the page to work for any level of user without feeling empty or crowded. We also wanted an emptier page to queue the job seeker and motivate them to take specific actions that would directly benefit them in their job hunt.

We used regular critiques to share feedback and iterate designs; throughout this process we built up the fidelity of our designs. Our process was limited by a major consideration, which was a lack of usability testing for our screens. This was due largely to our quick timeline before the end of our contract; however, we were often able to individually seek feedback on screens from our personal networks, and had regular input from Reno each week that informed our direction with additional thoughtful considerations.

An emptier profile should motivate the job seeker to take specific actions that would benefit their job search.