Redesigning career & education product experience to meet broader user and business goals

Context

In November 2020, On My Way (OMW) microsite was launched to empower and guide youths aged 15-25 in their educational and career journeys. The site garnered immense success, as measured by an independent impact assessment study which revealed that the site played a part in boosting youth’s confidence in making informed decisions about their education and career choices.

The team decided to ride on this success by further  improving the onsite user experience and expanding to meet other evolving needs such as  programme partners, and the business.

Info

Role
One of the two product designers

Timeline
Sept 2022 - Dec 2022

Tools
Figma, Google suite, Whimsical, Miro

Business objectives

Ideate

End results

This section covers key features that made it to the end after many rounds of iteration with youths and program partners. The section after this will give you more elaboration as to how I reached here.

How might we broaden and guide youth on their career and education pathways?

Explore Worlds

broadens youth perspectives. For instance, even though a composer and a dentist might appear quite different from each other, they would  be surprised to know that both play a part in creating a beautiful world. This new perspective helps to reveal possibilities that might not have been apparent to youths if i had designed job roles  in a more detailed and narrow fashion.

My Discoveries

provides youth with guidance as they navigate through the job roles and industries that they are most interested in. As shown in the top section, their bookmarking behaviour is captured to highlight the top worlds and industries that pique their interest, subtling nudging them to delve deeper into their exploration journey.

How might we collect youth data to better serve the youth community?

Singpass login, Youth profiles

Our goal was to extract and analyse clean youth data for analysis. This was achieved through two key methods: Personalised youth profiles + Logging in via Singpass.

Acquiring youth data for analysis strategically positioned the business to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the youth demographic. This enables us to make informed decisions and foster stronger digital relationships with them.

Programmes

The programme module now provides a comprehensive end-to-end experience for youth, allowing them to seamlessly browse, select, and register for programs—all within a unified portal. This stands in contrast to the previous setup, where individuals had to navigate through different sources, like formsg, emails, and telegram group for various program registration, leading to a loss of consolidated youth data.

Uncovering issues

User research
Insights & findings

I organised an online workshop with 30 prog partners to delve into their workflows, uncover pain points, and grasp their challenges. This guided enhancements in the program administration and gave us initial ideas and concepts to work with.

Subsequently, I engaged with 30 youths across three rounds to gather feedback on our initial design concepts. Below, you'll find the outcomes of our research and the artifacts utilized.

Testing & Iterations

Usability Testing
findings & iterations

Some of the iterations from the focus group discussions are illustrated before.
Before
Many youths struggled to understand what OMW was and how they could immediately benefit from using the site. Jumping straight into browse industry / job roles was too daunting.
After
Included meaningful hero section copy and complementary visuals, introduced onboarding cards for clear communication of OMW's value. Reorganised content strategy transitioning from a broad to a narrow search approach for different job roles.
Before
Many of the youths did not see the value of action plan and felt that it was just a ‘repository’ for their key actions. The impact of this feature was insignificant.
After
Reconceptualised the entire page to introduce top industries and worlds, and recommendations, empowering youths to take meaningful action in their journey by providing them insights.
Before
Youths were unfamiliar with jargons such as 'Network connects,'Taster programmes’ 'Lets talk' used as category filters in the hero section, leading to confusion.
After
Substituted category filters with intuitive verbs like 'engage' and 'experience,' and emphasised the visual treatment for filtering section to facilitate search behaviour.

Reflections

01
Knowing the right level of design fidelity to share is a skill
This will take practice and confidence. This experience taught me to remind myself that sometimes a napkin drawing can help things progress further that I could have imagined and rushing to hi-fi too early can cost more time and effort in the long-run. It’s always helpful to get early feedback as progress through our design process
02
Annotations are everything
I talk to a ton of stakeholders and my design evolves quite frequently. Even with meeting notes, i tend to forget the reasoning behind certain screens. It was after this experience, I decided to annotate all my screens for the benefit of everyone, so we are all clear on what we agreed upon and why