Step Skill

Overview

Step Skill is an app that allows students to build up their skills in self-paced according to the job description they want to apply. Step Skill is the future of a job-hunting app because it offers a personalized course, consultants, and portfolio-building instructions for designers to learn the skills of their dream jobs step by step.

Process

1. User Research

We have conducted literature review, interviews and survey with current students at LTXD and IDM to obtain qualitative and quantitative data on their opinions and attitudes towards the gap between skills provided in current program and the skills required by their dream jobs.

Hypothesized Problem: The skills provided by the LTXD program are insufficient to the requirements of the working industry

Target User Group: LTXD students

With the above hypothesized problem, we brought out the following research questions:

Does the hypothesized problem exist within our target user group?

How does the hypothesized problem impact our target user group?

What do they currently do to solve the problem and how effective are existing solutions?

Interviews

We conducted 4 stakeholder interviews and 4 user interviews, this is our affinity map:

Survey Data

4 Key Insights from Survey and Interviews:

Profitability Increases motivation to learn.

Lack of organization of learning materials leads to less motivation to learn.

Lack of personalized guidance in existing methods causes them to be less effective.

People learn better when given the opportunity to implement a skill practically and get feedback.

2. Empathy Map

We have consolidated the survey and interview results and created an empathy map to better visualize users’ needs and desires in terms of what they say, think, do and feel:

3. Persona

We have created two personas- Candice and Star- based on our research results to better empathize with our targeted audience.

4. How Might We?

We created 4 “How Might We?” questions accordingly:

5. Sketching

We did sketching on our 4 HMWs.

Goal: Generate a wide set of ideas in a short amount of time around a known and well understood HMWs.

Method Used: Crazy 8’s

Procedure:

Round 1: 8 ideas in 5 minutes

Since we have 4 HMWs and all are important as per out findings, we decided to have 2 ideas for each HMW, resulting in 8 ideas in total. Each participant folds a sheet of paper in half 3 times, then unfolds the paper. Each individual sketches 8 ideas in 5 minutes, one in each of the 8 rectangles created.

Round 2: 1 big idea in 5 minutes

Each person works individually to sketch one big idea in 5 minutes on a new piece of paper. You can build on a previous idea or combine elements of several ideas from the previous round.

Round 3: 1 storyboard/wireflow in 5 minutes

Building on the “big idea” from round 2, each individual uses a new piece of paper to sketch a storyboard on of all the key steps related to that idea that a user needs to take.

6. Storyboard

We have designed different storyboards to visually map out the user's experience with our prototype.

7. Usability Test

We created a low-fi prototype through Figma, an app that provides students

Then we conducted usability tests on some targeted users and got some findings:

The icon we thought to be clear for viewing jobs is not intuitive for the users. They considered this icon as a shopping cart for jobs or courses.

Users cannot understand the main flow of our app after they finishing the testing. Some functions are not intuitively range in order so they don’t understand the relation between. For example, the relationship between “courses” and “projects”.

The courses box at the top of the search was confusing and maybe redundant since users can view their courses using the courses button at the bottom

The “progress” does not make sense- the increase of salary cannot be linearly related to the length of video they have watched. Maybe this is a difficult issue requiring some mathematics to address.

8. Heuristic Evaluation

We have conducted a heuristic evaluation and noticed the following results:

Visibility of system status

How can one know that a course has been added to their list of courses

There isn't any sort of alerting system about the next milestones for courses registered

Match between system and the real world

The Course Description button in the Course doesn’t work. The user would expect something to happen since it is written in blue which makes it seem like a button

After clicking the code in the Forgot Password page, the interface expects the user to click somewhere to go to the next page. Instead, the page should automatically go to the next page or there should be some button for entering the code and then going to the next page

User control and freedom

The Search Box for searching jobs should be clickable

How can one add a course in in their list of registered courses

The back button on the Forgot Password page does not work

There is no back button after the Profile page

Consistency and standards

The search bar in the projects tab says “Search Courses”

The fonts in the Profile page should be lack and not gray for consistency

Recognition rather than recall

The pictures in the introduction of the app remain the same

Flexibility and efficiency of use

The button for saving the course doesn't work

Aesthetic and minimalist design

The courses box at the top of the search is sort of confusing and maybe redundant since users can view their courses using the courses button at the bottom

Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors

The back button on the Forgot Password page does not work

There is no back button after the Profile page

Help and documentation

There is no documentation for the application

Final Deliverables

Our final product is an app that provides LTXD students with a personalized and self-paced learning experience. We chose to include a few features such as a learning progress, personalized learning courses, industry specialist providing feedbacks on portfolio, and application for jobs in order to fit our users’ needs and motivate them to complete the skill gap bridging and finally apply for their dream jobs.

Takeaways:

🔑

A problem we faced: People tend to prefer information that confirms their existing beliefs and to undervalue information that contradicts their beliefs. So we learn that it is very important to be open-minded and be all ear to any other evidence and actually put some effort to think about it critically to avoid confirmation bias.