Acceleration
UX UI Designer
Jieun Mok (UX Designer) Lucy Kearny (UX Designer)
2020
Crank is a platform that facilitates finding people with a disability, work, advice and support. It is set to redefine the way people plan and manage their career transitions and up skilling journeys
My Role
- Led communication with the client
- Recruited and scheduled participants for workshops
- Collaborated on quantitative and qualitative UX research
- Conducted tests and compiled new insights
- Iterated on new concepts for second round of user testing
- Developed UI elements, style guides, and final prototypes
Project Context: A person with disability who feels frustrated about looking for work and needs to get placed into appropriate long term employment but faces challenges with creating a sense of community and transparency from the DES providers.
"I was looking for a job for 1.5 years, then gave up"
Male job seeker with a disability
1 in 5 people in Australia are living with a disability, however less than 50% of those people (47.8%) aged under 64 are working.
JobAccess Barriers Survey found that 77% of employers stated disability and diversity is important, it also found that only 37% were exhibiting any supportive behaviours.
Whilst there are disability employment services available to Australians, many people, carers and businesses find the schemes difficult to navigate and face long waiting times and seemingly non-existent real time feedback on job applications.
Requirement 1:
Understand motivators to drive our target audience to sign up to Crank
Requirement 2
Design a digital experience that drives people through the onboarding
Based on our user research, three personas were adapted. Each persona had a scenario that identified realistic traits, the user might have been working with. For the purpose of this project we identied with Brian Miller. Journey as shown below. This focused on his pain points and opportunities that further developed into solutions for Brian, and other users like Brian.
How might we
How might we help people with disabilities looking for work, so that they get placed into appropriate long term employment
How might we we provide better employment management with transparency so that they trust the information we provided and get a right place that fit in them.
To visualise each solution, we created an MVP Map to prioritize the best methods. The User Flow guided users through the extensive application contents. Initially, it was challenging to meet stakeholder expectations and user needs, so we wireframed to test assumptions.
UX UI Elements
To assist the process, we looked at precedent UI elements, frameworks and services. The Design case studies helped us focus on the visual elements.
The PROBLEM(S):
uncertainity for application
information overload, causing confusion in application process
lack of community at new workplace
The SOLUTION(s):
onboarding with simple language
systematic process for applying for jobs
community element that allowed people to find users with similar interests or job allocations. a chat system, for users and service providers
We created a set of design principles to unite our design team as we moved into execution mode. These principles were extremely helpful for aligning with stakeholders and justifying the reasoning behind design decisions.
Wireframes
As you can see, the first round of Low Fidelity testing was confused with what the app was trying to deliver. They felt they needed more education & more information about the service. Some users felt items were repeated and was not necessary, while others were stating it was trying to do too much.
2 out of 3 users were confused about the rating system.
3 out of 3 users said the information architecture flowed well
Prototype
I recruited 5 people to test the prototype. The participants were users that needed to find jobs.
The objective of the test was :
- How easily users were able to sign up for a new account.
- How easily users are able to complete their profile.
- How easily users are able to an interesting job and apply for it.
- How easily users could find people who already worked in this industry and send them a message.
- How does the overall experience feel like
- What improvements need to be made
UI Kit
2 out of 3 had some issues with completing navigation tasks.
Our design also uses neomorphism, which allows the design to focus on the color palette, delivering an entirely unique experience for the user. With accessibility issues coming into play, we also designed an accessible prototype, which allowed users to select what is best for them.
Final Design
Conclusion
Our design for Crank app had 5 out of 5 users thought the final visuals made job seeking more accessible and 4 out of 5 users described the app as easy to use, with comments such as "really like the illustrations",
"complex enough, but simple to use", "I wish that seek looked like this" but also "it feels like it is trying to be too many things".
Every project has its own constraints, and we found the initial brief to be very ambigious. I have learnt that is imperative to have clear expectations from the beginning with stakeholders, ensuring no misunderstandings. An insightful project, as it is amazing to see how little support there is to job seeking for individuals with disability. This project validated the importance of creating trust to users but still has a lot more research to undertake for future growth. I look forward to working on projects that empower and make a difference in people's lives.