Ed Tech Job Search Tool

As a design team for an education platform, we were in charge of building a better job search experience for college students about to enter the workforce. To communicate the blue-sky concept to leadership, we built key screens showing possible features in action.

My team worked with product people to understand the preliminary requirements for a new job search platform, then we built blue-sky screens to showcase what the platform could do. We built our screens around a user persona, and we demonstrated potential interactions and features through the lens of the user’s hypothetical journey through the future-state platform. Our work was used by leadership, to communicate the new product vision, so they could get space on the roadmap and cultivate buy-in for this new product build.

After our work was used in leadership meetings, roadmap allocation was given and we got to dig in deeper to work on a more realistic MVP version of the experience.

• Dedicated time to familiarize ourselves with one core functionality differentiators of our platform: skill and fit assessments.
• Took proposed tests ourselves as individuals, mapped potential concerns and opportunities, then met with the team who were responsible for creating and improving the tests to share our findings.
• Advocated for different user types and goals, striving to find middle ground that made the new product helpful for both job seekers and companies, without crossing ethical lines.
• Prioritized user customization to show results they wanted to companies, rather than serving all data directly to job posting entities without consideration.

• Product stakeholders who drove the requirements hadn't been a part of the target user group (college students) in over 20 years, yet maintained confidence that they understood the ideal user experience; I would ideally want to find a way get user feedback to incorporate, even if we are only building screens for a proposal.
• There was a lot of churn around process. I'd do more to escalate this earlier, to avoid artificially short timelines that impact team well-being.