Career Calculator: How a customer journey map helped us focus on an MVP for our 3 week sprint

Career Calculator was our first Community Partner Project from RED Academy. We were given 3 weeks to produce a high-fidelity, mobile-first, responsive website. The main objective of Career Calculator was to attract data focused people interested in career exploration and planning.

RESEARCH

73% of Canadians don’t expect to remain in the same profession for their lifetime.

Work takes up ⅓ of our life, consider what values are important to you. Planning for your future is an effective way to ensure you don’t lose your motivation and maximize your potential.

Most common reasons for changing careers include:

• 35%: Discovering a new field they’re passionate about

• 24%: Becoming bored with their original career

• 19%: Lack of advancement/layoffs

How many different career paths have you followed?

As per Workopolis, a majority of Canadians (73%) do not anticipate staying in the same profession for their entire lives. Canadians are likely to pursue 2–3 different career paths throughout their lifetime.

INTERVIEWS & SURVEYS

We conducted six 1:1 interviews and received 43 responses to our survey. Some of the key findings were:

• 84% of those surveyed talked to people in the industry when making a career change

• Interests, Salary, alignment of values and skill matching were ranked as important deciding factors in a career

• Nearly 70% of those surveyed saw value in career planning, even though only 30% had actually used a career counsellor

PLANNING

PRIMARY PERSONA

Karan has been working in healthcare for 5 years and is getting sick and tired of the long hours, high stress environment, and unrealistic expectations. She would like to explore new career opportunities that align with her values, passions, and skills. She’s open to taking courses to upgrade her skills, but like everyone else, she has a set budget and wouldn’t want to be studying for more than a year. She doesn’t know what industry she wants to go into and is planning to do some research.

Karan values professional opinions of those working in the industry. She also wants to validate her findings with family and friends. She’s never used a career counsellor before, but sees value in preparing a 3–5 year career plan.

Karan is frustrated with her current career and wants a better work/life balanceKaran had an especially frustrating day at work. It’s a thankless job without a lot of fulfillment, but it pays the bills. Her son is growing up fast and she worries with her current career she would miss him growing up entirely. She needs a better work/life balance.

She talks to her friends and family about changing careers. She wonders what type of careers are out there that aren’t as demanding and align with her values. She knows tech jobs are in demand right now. But upon research, it was frustrating that the current career research sites couldn’t keep up with the constantly evolving tech industry. These sites only catered to public schools with longer programs. As she wants to have stability, she needs to find something where she can take a quick program directly tied to industry.

She sees an ad on LinkedIn for Career Calculator, the one stop shop for career related information. She grabs a cup of tea, gets comfy and starts planning her future.

CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP

Comparing careers and schools was an overwhelming process. We discovered our unique selling point from examining the pain points of Karan during her customer journey map. In our competitive comparative, our competitors had an external link to a relatively unknown website to compare schools. The goal of Career Calculator was to keep the user on the site throughout all steps of their career exploration process. In addition, the schools they listed were only for public schools. With the rapidly changing career landscape, we chose to design a site that could evolve at the speed of such changes.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE & USER FLOW

Given the quick turnaround time and the startup nature of this project, we decided to develop an MVP user flow focused on career and school exploration. We incorporated a detailed visual sitemap that our clients could expand on later.

DESIGN

Our site was crafted to be clean, straightforward, and user-friendly to simplify the often overwhelming process of career exploration. Ample white space, icons, and brief descriptions were incorporated to facilitate easy content absorption. We introduced dynamic motion with geometric shapes to motivate our users to advance toward a new career.

• CIRCLES: free movement and completeness

• DIAMONDS: clarity, transformation and wisdom

• TRIANGLES: the mathematical symbol for change (contained within the diamond section divider)

  
  

COLOUR THEORY

We chose to go with modern BC colours

• TEAL: trust, security and calming

• YELLOW: A bold colour for call to action buttons and feature banners to encourage excitement and happiness

• GREY: Professionalism & Structure — used for text throughout the site

TYPOGRAPHY AND FONT CHOICE

We chose clean, impactful, modern fonts that were easy to read and professional. Fjalla One is an impactful, clean sans serif used for headings. For the body copy, Domine is a crisp serif with a taller x-height that makes it legible even at smaller sizes.

DESIGN SYSTEMS

Because of the shortened timelines imposed by the project schedule, we recognized the necessity of providing our client with a comprehensive design library. This documentation serves as a crucial reference for a smooth transition for the client as they embark on the next phases of their product development journey. Our goal was to provide them with the tools and resources necessary to build upon the foundation we established, ensuring that they can achieve their vision while adhering to the high standards of quality we set during our collaboration.

TESTING

Test, Design, Repeat. A large portion of our design process was focused on usability testing on paper prototypes. This method was the most efficient way for our team to quickly test and validate while encouraging rapid design iterations. Any potential usability problems were detected early on before moving onto mid and high fidelity prototypes.

PROJECT GOALS

GOAL: Develop a 5-Year-Plan

SOLUTION: Exploration first for our Minimum Viable Product

We were originally tasked with designing a customizable 5-year plan for our users. The Baby Boomers generation were able to work in the same job and career their entires lives. That’s no longer the reality and we have to adapt to the constantly evolving career field. While people would like to plan 5 years in advance, technology and education can be outdated in that amount of time.

For our 3 week project, we decided to focus on the process prior to building out a career plan: Career and school exploration. Without this process being thoroughly planned, the site wouldn’t be functional. This allowed us to provide a minimal viable product for our clients to further develop after the 3 weeks ended.

GOAL: Powerful search ability

SOLUTION: Guide them through the process

Originally, the site had a search bar on the main page, but most people didn’t know what to search for and were overwhelmed. We put the search bar as a secondary element in the navigation menu. Instead we focused on guiding the user to explore careers through suggestions with our Top Trending Industries, Careers and Schools and Featured Careers and Schools. The ability to compare careers and schools in one place keeps our users on the website.

GOAL: Be credible and transparent

SOLUTION: Social proofing, mission and values

From our survey results, we found that 70% of our users used LinkedIn and highly valued industry professional opinions when searching for jobs. We connected testimonials and industry insights with the person’s LinkedIn. This helped validate them and allowed the user navigating the site to connect/network with real people. The company’s missions and values is in the homepage carousel to build trust with our user right away.

GALLERY