Overall, I was able to practice my UX and UI skills by creating an end-to-end product following the double diamond design process.

• Facilitator: I took the initiative to start, motivate teammates to collaborate remotely, and keep the team on schedule.
• UX Researcher: I was able to move the team forward by proposing using affinity maps and storyboards to refine our problem space.
• Product designer: I worked with another designer to lead the iterative design process & make major final decisions for the pitch.
• Visual Design: I challeged myself to redesign some of the UI after the project was done.

1. Secondary research on the community

"How might we adapt to new contexts for learning and work? " With the general problem statement, we observed online communities.

2. Primary research on our target users

Knowing the general situation, we first sent out a survey to gather quantitative data about how the student community were dealing with the situations.

Then we performed interviews to get qualitative data by investigating students' job hunting experience specifically.

As the team was discussing the potential stakeholders involved in the general job hunting process. One designer proposed that we haven’t heard much from the recruiters side, which was also critical for the success of job hunting. Upon hearing that, I quickly did some online research and worked with the other designer to create the recruiter persona.

The need of students and recruiters were actually on the two ends of a balance:

• student applicants need to showcase their skillsets
• recruiters need to see how those showcases fit for the positions.

For the scope of the project, we chose to focus on the students’ needs while keeping recruiters’ needs in mind.

At first, the team was a bit lost on where to go next. I proposed that we can use an affinity map to organize info. And through the affinity map I made, we were able to narrow down 3 main pain points:

In order to find out more about our 3 painpoints, we took a look at some competitor products to see how/if they were solving for these issues.

By analyzing the 4 aspects that users concerned the most from the research, we realized that each area had its own competitive products that fulfill a specific need. However, there was a lack of a more multifunctional platform that was targeted for students job seekers. The opportunity area is to efficiently and directly present a more well-rounded skill sets of students to the recruiters.

Competitor analysis also helped refined our scope by identifying:

• the market limitation imposed by the downturn in the economy.
• it was a universal concern for students with or without the pandemic.

Long story short, there are 4 features within the app that try to help students network and grow their skills.

To validate our design, we started our tesing very early on and made informed design decision on the each iteration.

With deeper understanding of Design Guideline and usability heuristics, I've decided to challenge myself to redesign the screens and practice my prototyping skills.

➡️ My redesign goal was also to create an exciting and enduring user experience through visceral, behavioral and reflective emotional design.

First of all, I chose the onboarding user flow:

02. After the project was done, I aimed to polish the visual design of the navbar by improving the usability & accessibility.

03. Moreover, I also redesigned the home screen for readability, consistent vibe and personalization.

There are 2 ways to create a new project:

1. users customize project name, description, roles and deadlines.
2. create with "recruiter picked" prompt that recruiters from top companies have provided.

02. To create customized projects, I aimed to reduce users' cognitive load physically and visually.

03. To create projects from template provided by top companies, I aimed to follow users' main goal coming to this platform, which focus more on companies and less on specific job title (different companies might call similar positions with different job titles).

To minimize user's memory load, we designed a color coded system help users recognize the project status.

• Yellow: Finished -> the feeling of triumph
• Purple: Work in Progress -> keep calm and focus on doing great work
• Pink: Recruiting -> not yet started but soon!

In my redesign, I aimed to take advantage of the ownership effect, encouraging users to mark and track their achievements and progress through sessions.

On a scale from 1 to 10, interviewees would likely recommend the app to a friend with an average score of 8.6.

Even though the project started during pandemic, our solid research on users and market suggested that the need of skill improvement and networking persists regardless. We took the business development perspective into consideration when ideated for solutions and we tried not to limit ourselves under the scope of pandemic only.

For future investigation, more researches on the recruiters side could be done to better cater the product for a win-win situation.