Making Waves.

 

Utilising behavioural research in order to provide a seamless learning platform focused on personal and professional growth.

NB: This was a fictional group project completed during my UX studies at General Assembly

The realm of personal and professional growth can often feel like a never ending rabbit-hole of self-help material, impersonal pathway programs and dispassionate career coaching. Studies have consistently shown that young people looking for personal and professional growth often feel overwhelmed and undervalued during this process — luckily Ripple is here to help.

Introduction

Ripple is a holistic online platform that helps young people amplify their impact in every sphere of their lives. Ripple defines these spheres as career, community and civics —  but for now, their vision for a holistic solution is limited by multiple siloed digital platforms.

“The primary task was to consolidate these platforms, with a secondary focus on optimising the onboarding process.”

The Challenge for Ripple

Ripple currently have separate online platforms to house their various service offerings. This has inevitably led to a clunky user experience with multiple login screens and inaccessible domains. How could we streamline this process to ensure a seamless and informative experience for both Ripple and its users?

What did we deliver?

  • Our behavioural research told us that during the early stages of career growth, many young people feel overwhelmed and undervalued, so our final product had to simplify this process in order to address this major pain-point.

  • We incorporated a timeline device to the homepage in an effort to simplify Ripple’s product offering based on the user’s current life stage. This made it simple for users, regardless of where they were in their professional careers, to quickly see Ripple’s product offerings at a glance and effectively navigate to the section most pertinent to their needs.

  • An information architecture audit and overhaul allowed us to streamline the landing page to highlight Ripple’s main product offerings, in an effort to increase the completion rate during onboarding.

so, where did we begin?
we laid down the foundations, of course.

Defining the project goals
Overall, these were the key points that would serve as our North Star(s) for the project in its entirety:

  1. Consolidate current Ripple offerings into one unified platform to create a more seamless user-experience from end-to-end

  2. Create a more seamless onboarding process to minimise user drop-off rates

  3. Build Ripple’s digital presence and brand equity

Project constraints - Planning ahead to get ahead

Our team consisted of 4 UX designers: 2 based in Sydney, one in Brisbane, and one in Melbourne (me). 

  • Working across two different timezones meant some concessions had to be made in regards to the frequency and consistency of our team catch ups.

  • We created a flexible timeline that catered for slightly more time during the design phase, as we anticipated the task of platform consolidation to be slightly more UI focused. 

  • The Christmas and New Years break landed squarely between our project time. We agreed as a team that this time would be tools down, so we aimed to complete the initial phases of ideation before w/c Dec 20. This target was easily achieved.

 

Research: building our foundation

Once we had dissected the brief and identified our project goals, it was time for us to lay down a research plan. As per our client brief, Ripple’s definition of a ‘young person’ was aged between 17–26. We had initial consultations with the client early on in the process, and this helped identify our key objectives for the preliminary research phase:

1

Gain insights into the challenges that young people potentially face when looking for early-mid stage career growth.

2

Identify the primary methods younger demographics use to find industry opportunities and why they use them.

3

3. Understand how users currently feel about the current Ripple platform in order to collect insights regarding challenges and pain-points

 

Market Research - Assessing the landscape

Our first point of call was to not only research and understand similar products currently on the market, but also to gain statistical information regarding the youth of Australia during this time of their lives. 
We found the following qualitative points regarding Australian youth worth noting:

  • More than 4 in 10 (42%) of young people aged 15–19 felt stressed all of the time or most of the time.*

  • More than 7 in 10 (75%) of year 12 graduates continue to higher education rather than seek full-time employment in the workplace.

  • More than 4 in 10 (42.4%) of young people aged 15–19 felt that work experience is one of the key factors that contribute to future employability.*

*Statistics taken from the annual Mission Australia youth survey, with a total of 25,800 respondents

Our market research also included comparative and competitive research into the following websites in order to gain insights into products that occupy a similar space as Ripple: 

We found that most of these platforms included the same basic offering (job hunting platform), with only a few going above and beyond to provide a more holistic experience for their users that focused more on growth :

  • Year 13 - includes a navigation functionality that compartmentalises Year 13’s product offerings from Culture, Money, Travel and wellbeing:

  • FYA (Foundation for Young Australians) - Provides a more tailored approach to their services for users. They offer a range of growth programs focused on building a strong foundation for the youth of today to build from:

User Research - User Interviews
As our target audience was clearly defined from the brief (17–26yo, from High School students to early stage industry professionals) our challenge was to craft questions that would extract the richest insights from the youth of today. We wanted to focus on the following areas of behavioural insight: 

  • User perceptions towards job-hunting and career prospecting

  • How much influence and importance the user places on extra-curricular up-skilling such as mentorship and networking

  • Perceived level of industry preparedness after full-time study (post high school, university etc.)

  • Level of importance user places on creating ‘social impact’ and their overall understanding of the concept.

User interviews for our primary persona/archetype consisted of
13 people (male & female) aged between 18 and 24.

 

This demo bracket included users who had recently graduated high school to users who had just entered industry, and everyone inbetween.

Synthesis:
Piecing it together

Key Takeaways — What did we learn?

We used affinity mapping in order to collate our insights and identify common themes from our users.

A

8 Users
found the overall experience of job-hunting to be challenging, stressful, daunting and/or overwhelming

B

6 Users
ranked Mentorship highly when asked what factors they felt would help them secure industry placement

C

5 Users
cited a lack of practical work experience to be a major challenge regarding perceived employability

Introducing our Archetype

Mentor-Me-Mel

Our Archetype at a glance

  • Does not feel confident in regards to her future prospects in industry

  • She does not feel that her studies adequately prepared her to enter industry

  • Values mentorship and sees this as a key factor in her personal and professional growth

  • Possesses a limited professional network and looks mainly to her social circle for direction/advice

 

Journey Map: Bringing Mels journey to life

A journey map allowed us to add more depth to our persona and provided us with a key artefact that helped visualise the thoughts and feelings that our user experienced through her journey:

“We noticed that there was a distinct drop in confidence after Mel’s full-time studies, partially attributed to a lack of structure and guidance”

Ideation:
building our creative launchpad

(Problem Statement & HMW conception)

We reconvened as a group to ideate on a problem statement that would help frame our persona most accurately in relation to Ripple’s main challenge and landed on the below: 

““Mel needs to feel empowered to develop her skills so that she can reach her full potential upon entering the job market””

We found this problem statement gave us room to pivot within (but not limited to) the spaces of empowerment, confidence (or lack thereof), self-optimisation and encouragement. 

Having a well-rounded problem statement allowed us to ideate in depth within the aformentioned thought spaces, and as a group we settled on these two HMW statements as the basis of our creative development: 

HMW 1

HMW encourage Mel to challenge herself to realise her full capabilities?

HMW 2

HMW prove to Mel that unlocking her career potential is easier than she expects?


We spent an afternoon ideating on both of these HMW’s separately, with the goal of picking the HMW which yielded the most promising ideation space:

Upon full creative review, we all unanimously agreed that HMW #1 would serve as the launchpad for our creative concept, as it yielded the most interesting conversations amongst our group: 

““HMW encourage MMM to challenge herself to realise her capabilities?””

Once a problem space had been identified, we felt it might be helpful to add further dimension to our persona by creating a storyboard for Mentor-Me-Mel. This served as a neat visual tool to help us understand how our persona thinks and feels as she moves through the problem space, as shown below:

ideation: pen to paper

Crazy 8’s & design studio

During our first two rounds of Crazy 8’s, we took note of common themes we produced as individuals, as well as ‘ideas we liked’. With a solid base of ideas to build from, we put away an afternoon for a dedicated Design Studio session. This session yielded some interesting concepts and we were able to hone in on a prototype build concept rather quickly. These sketches served as the basis of a ‘timeline’ concept: 

Information Architecture — What are we currently working with?

In order for us to progress any further with our design, we needed to understand how the current Ripple IA was structured. As you can see below, the original IA is severely disjointed and clunky, resulting in a rather frustrating user experience: 

Our proposal for a new and improved IA housed all products within a single domain, and placed an emphasis on clarity of information and story-flow as oppposed to maximum information transfer. As our research has shown us that users are often already feeling overwhelmed when embarking on this journey, our primary objective was to create as seamless a web experience as possible whilst minimising cognitive overload:

Task Flow — User trajectory and the Golden Path

Once we were able to visualise the proposed IA, building a linear task flow was the next logical step. This would help us to identify the amount of potential screens to build, as well as flesh out any other details which may not be visible at a macro level: 

design: getting our hands dirty

Once we had finalised the user task flow, it was time for us to begin building our screens. The homepage would play a key role in achieving the client’s objective (platform consolidation) and though our first concept wasn’t perfect, it served as a strong platform for further iteration:

For our initial prototype, we placed a strong emphasis on ‘finding opportunities’ as our research told us this was the primary focus for our users.

The website would scroll vertically and would highlight key services and offerings that Ripple can provide at varying life stages.

We felt this was the best way to simplify the user journey as we reasoned that people at different life stages may be looking for different services.

The primary demographic we interviewed existed within this space of post-uni, pre-industry. 

Iteration: client feedback

How did we go?

We facilitated a client feedback session in order to gauge our progress and to receive valuable stakeholder input regarding our initial prototype. The insights we gained from this session were invaluable and can be summarised in the following points: 

  • Our prototype was too focused around a ‘linear’ goal trajectory i.e transitioning from one stage to the next, whereas Ripple’s vision was more holistic and accommodated the bigger picture (personal growth, mentoring etc).

  • Too much prominence was placed on ‘finding opportunities’/job searching and not enough on the full suite of products that Ripple offered.

  • Client suggested we focus on three main areas of the user’s journey: Discovery, growth and influence. These would potentially serve as key pathways for the Ripple Audience.

  • Client was keen to see how we would incorporate an onboarding flow for the next design iteration.

As we received this feedback a week out of the final presentation date, we knew that consolidating the client feedback with the research we had already conducted was going to be a fine balancing act. We debriefed and discussed this feedback as a team and came up with the following solutions:

The landing page now focuses on setting the tone for Ripple and the services they provide, as opposed to focusing on ‘finding opportunities’

The ‘timeline’ concept now takes less precedence and is now only housed in one section of the homepage, as opposed to the entire page top to bottom.. 

…which now left plenty of room in the remainder of the website for the elaboration of Ripple’s grander vision for it’s users. 

Onboarding

An onboarding flow was included with the revised prototype and was subsequently tested with our users. The purpose of this new flow was to enable Ripple to provide a more tailored experience for the user upon signing up for their services. 

delivery: User testing

How well did we do?

4 out of 5 users did not utilise the timeline as intended

Users commonly cited the fact that it was not clear that the timeline was interactive. This may have been a fidelity issue due to the pared back aesthetic of the low fidelity prototype. The one user who successfully utilised the timeline found the functionality helpful and concise.

5 out of 5 users successfully completed the onboarding process

However, users encountered minor issues at certain screens, particularly at the LinkedIn screen and ‘council area’ screen. We resolved this by including a ‘skip’ button on the LinkedIn Screen, and minimised the amount of copy in the ‘council area’ screen in an effort to reduce cognitive load.

3 out of 5 users would prefer to enter their own career challenges

Rather than select from a predetermined list of challenges Ripple had provided.

Reflections: what did we learn?

This project (P5) was the culmination of our learnings from previous group projects. As a result, our team had a very solid understanding of methodologies that worked well for us in the past, and others that did not.