2022
None (Solo Project)
UI Design, UX Research
UX/UI Designer
With increasingly intensified competition and lack of employment opportunities, undergraduates are hard to find a job after graduation. In this situation, if students don't make their career plans as soon as possible and build extensive connections, students are likely to be "unemployed after graduation".
The goal is to design a fully-functional and user-friendly application that helps colleges/universities students to reduce stress and anxiety from job-seeking. With the original purpose of academic, providing online discussing space. The functionalities includes: build and review resume, engage and connect with others, relax with four different methods, practice interview skills, and explore jobs.
I analyzed the 3 online platform that the students would use. I found that most of the competitors do not focus on students' mental health, but mainly focus on developing their career paths. For the other competitors such as Calm, it only focus on reducing stress.
I conducted interviews with 5 students who were stressed with job-seeking after graduation. I’ve asked them questions below to find the reasons why they were stressed versus others who can deal with stress. Then I organized all the data through affinity map.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
1. What is the reason that make you stress from job-seeking?
2. What would you do when you feel pressure?
3. What activities or ways can help you release your stress?
4. Do you have any tips or skills recommendations for the university students when they graduate? Why?
5. Could you tell me your experience of getting your first job after graduation?
Based on the information in my affinity map, I’ve also noticed that if an app provides too much information (eg: focusing entirely on achievement sharing among students) can also increase anxiety. Appropriate casual topics or activities will increase student motivation to keep moving forward.
3 participants mentioned it is helpful if they can be guided from other who has experience.
2 participants mentioned in-class resume review sessions were helpful
Most applications and websites lack of attention in students' mental health
2 participants concerned about how to build their connection in real life.
Providing too many information at the same time will increase participants' stress
3 participants concerned about if they would fit in society
Some users do not want to share their resume with public
Could not edit text size or font in build your resume screen
Icons on the explore post & function screen seem not related
Improving the users profile. Only allow others to view the users' most recent activity. This function can be turn off from the setting.
Adding the edit bar on the top of the typing place. Users would be able to adjust their text.
This was improved by using the same style of icons to replace the old ones.
I started from drawing paper wireframes with different ideas. I creates various screens with smooth flow that I can get short reviews from some of the interviewees.
After I had the main screens of the flow ready, I designed a low-fidelity wireframe on Figma, which I used to build a low-fidelity prototype for the users' feedback.
Based on various feedback from 5 other interviewees, I continually iterated my design over the span of 2 weeks with 3 major improvements, which including:
This is one of my favorite projects because it relates to me the most as a student. I am very grateful to have gone through the whole UX process, I have learned a lot and can better present it more fully. There're few things that I learnt and could be improved:
1. More iterations. I changed some details back and forth during the wireframe phase and did three iterations while making the high-fidelity prototype. If I have more time, I will do more iterations to ensure the user needs are met.
2. Learn about UX writing. While making this app, I found that I was not familiar enough with the use of UX writing. I will learn more about the use of text in the future and interact with it with help users.
3. More interviews or questionnaires. I only conduct interviews in this project through face-to-face and zoom. But in order to get more data and learn more about students from different cultural backgrounds, I would like to get more information in the future to make sure my sources are reliable.
4. Optimize UI. Improve design aesthetics and make the overall app more consistent. And focus on the brand design.
5. Constantly update and pursuit of progress. Take the time to understand market trends as well as recent design trends. Also, I would apply the tendency to this app. I think younger students are more attracted to what's trendy today, which also increases user usage and loyalty.
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