#Figma
#Casestudy
#Bubble.io
#SaaS
GOAL: Explore problems students are currently facing during their job hunt and understand what issues recruiters are running into
Based on 20+ interviews with hiring managers, HR, and recruiters, they face three main issues during the hiring process for recent graduates:
Misaligned career and education for candidates entering the workforce
Lack of real-world experience for students and entry-level employees
Difficult for hiring professionals to assess soft skills during the hiring process
Lack of networking and mentorship opportunities for students
Takeaways
After conducting user interviews, we discovered found three goals the platforms should achieve in the MVP: 1. Allows students to gain industry project experience 2. Boosts a student’s confidence in their skills through practice 3. Allow employers to access candidate skills through projects
User Personas
GOAL: Provide a narrative for user research results.
After conducting and analyzing the user interviews, we segmented users based on their similarities and needs to create two user personas. This allowed us to better identify the motivations, frustrations, and demographic information of each user type.
From our research and user interviews, we identified two key audiences- hiring manager and entry-level candidate (recent graduate). These personas acted as a benchmark for our team and guided us through the design process.
Sandra seeks candidates that exhibit soft skills and wants to find diverse candidates but resumes can be deceiving and difficult to determine candidates' willingness to learn.
Ann recently joined the workforce a year ago but wants to pivot her career to a Product Designer but finds it difficult to gain experience outside of her online class.
GOAL: Explore current solutions on the market and identify how we can stand out.
Based on our research, we discovered a few weaknesses and strengths of potential competitors. To make sure our solution stood out amongst competitors, we concluded that these few key factors must be reflected in our features:
Pavenly promotes equal opportunity and increases workplace diversity
Employers can take a trial before hire approach
Candidates can load projects directly on Pavenly in order to showcase their work to future employers
Lastly, there’s a lower barrier to entry to provide real-world experience for all levels
Wireframes + Focus Group
Since our time is limited for this project, we realized that it would be most efficient if we focused on a single key feature for the MVP. We decided that conducting a focus group will provide us further insight into the feasibility and importance of our features.
We had the opportunity to present our 3 concepts to a group of recruiters and students for direct feedback. From this session, we discovered that out of all 3 features, the micro-internships were favored by both recruiters and students.
We determined that the micro-internships should be the key feature for the current phase of the project.
User Flow
Based on our final key feature, we evaluated how users would complete essential tasks within the app, and mapped them out with user flows.
As a hiring manager, they want to start a project, check project status, and access candidates. As a candidate, we want to explore available micro internships and our current progress.
A simple design system was created in order to maintain a cohesive interface design. Since Pavenly is a platform dedicated to providing experience and value for candidates, I wanted to choose elements that provides a motivational and educational vibe. To keep the platform minimalistic and easy to view, I decided to stick with two typographies and also throw in a few bright colors to keep the mood refreshing.
Company View - Project Dashboard
Company View - Candidate Progress
Candidate View - Micro-Internship Discovery
This project had a problem I personally experienced in college. Despite the lack of initial knowledge, our team was able to conduct extensive research to create a solution that has the ability to stand out amongst current market competitors. Our next steps would be to build out screens for the other remaining features and apply the feedback we received from the usability tests.
⭐️
This project was accepted into Harvard's i-lab acceleration program
