Career Expert Web App

askCareer is a responsive web application designed to help people receive professional career advice by leading career experts. 

Users are able to connect with career experts via chat or video calls and get tailored professional career advice or even find career advice in a rich article insights section and solve their career queries instantly.

There are countless websites and web apps which offer career advice but the majority of them provide generic or standardised career advice. Users who need information about a specific career issue which suits exactly their profile need to spend a significant amount of time in online research to find their answer. 

The Challenge for askCareer was to design a web app which offers tailor-made career advice to users by connecting them with selected career experts and allowing them to build a relationship with them and get the exact information they need regarding their specific situation.

The market advantage of askCareer relies to customisation and the empowerment of users:

- Users can search through filters and select the exact career expert who suits their needs

- Users can build a relationship with their experts and get a tailored advice for their career query connecting with them via video call or chat

- Users can connect with each other and exchange experiences as part of the askCareer Community.

askcareer is a responsive web app and was designed using  the mobile-first approach. To create askCareer I applied Design Thinking, Iterative Design, and Human Centred Design Strategies. 

I used a set of approved UX Design skills and tools to develop industry-standard deliverables. 

Soloing for askCareer I conducted Competitor Analysis, User Research, Ideation, Information Architecture, Wireframes & Prototyping, User Testing, Interface Design, and Project Communication.

June 2020 - October 2020

Adobe XD, Balsamiq Wireframes, Whimsical, Optimal Workshop, Usability Hub

Our career seekers need a way to find a tailor-made, prompt, reliable and affordable advice from a career professional to a career-related issue that they have because they want to find a right for them, fulfilling job where they can have high impact and develop themselves professionally.

We will know this to be true when we see many users using our app, receiving expert advice from our professionals and leaving a high-rated feedback for our app and our experts.​​​​​​​

1. To better understand behavior when career seekers are in need of help for taking decisions/actions to start or advance their career.

2. To determine which tasks users would like to complete using a career experts app.

3. Documenting user pain points with existing websites/apps on the market.

4. Collecting data on the context in which users would use a career experts app.

As part of the Information Architecture I created a Sitemap to define how the information would be allocated within my web app and how the navigation of the design would be structured.

Using a Similarity Matrix to analyse the test results we can see the clusters of the most closely related content pairings.

- The main categories seem to already be arranged in a logical way for the users

- ‘Saved Articles’ and ‘Saved Experts’ seem to make more sense to most of our participants to be seen under the category of ‘Articles’ and ‘Experts’ respectively instead of ‘My profile’. However, for our product users will have access to those pages from both ways

- 'Payment' is important for our users to be included in their personal data, where the section 'My Profile' is.

After Card Sorting the Sitemap was refined depicting the results of the test.

Having a solid understanding of the user flows that are needed as well as of the navigation that my design should entail I started sketching the first wireframes of my web app on paper to transform these flows into a concrete representation. 

After several iterations I was able to to transform the wireframes into a low-fidelity prototype which focused mainly on core functions that my web app needs to cover.

Usability Testing was conducted with 6 participants ensuring that they resemble the user personas of my web app. The goal was to assess the learnability, efficiency and satisfaction for new users interacting with my web app. 

After the analysis of the results I gained valuable feedback which was used for further iterations which improved the usability of my design.

Based on a carefully prepared Test Script and a thorough Test Plan participants were given 4 scenarios and were asked to complete a task for each scenario.

In order to start interpreting the information from my usability tests I created an Affinity Map and a Rainbow Spreadsheet. 

This allowed me isolate and group information and finally extract patterns of behavior or sentiment across my participants. The information was sorted according to 4 categories: Observations, Positive Quotes, Negative Quotes and Errors

The Rainbow Spreadsheet shed light to 5 important issues/errors within my prototype that needed to be changed for a more usable and useful user experience.

The errors were ranked and measured according severity using Jakob Nielsen's error severity scale (0= 'I don't agree this is a usability problem at all' - 4= Usability catastrophe. Imperative to fix before product launch)

Preference testing was conducted with 20 participants giving to them two versions of the landing page to choose from which gave me an additional feedback to further iterate my web app.