Career aptitude platform to discover your dream job
UX research ▪ Freelance ▪ Contract
How might we help college graduates find a job that they’re passionate about?
Sole UX researcher
July 2022 – December 2022
Defining the scope
When Step By Step (Career Coaching Institution) hired me, they described the nature of their problem as follows:
“Many people who come to us for career path consult are planning to pursue a career in tech. But the majority of them ask us, “How would I know which career path I should pursue?” “Is this something that I can be successful at?” “What if I become successful at this job but end up hating it?”
After the stakeholder interview, I was tasked to do the followings:
Exploratory research of the market
Analyzing the current user-base
Analyzing the current solutions
Many college students finish college feeling lost because they don’t like their field of study, but they also don’t know which career path to pursue. This is a problem because choosing a career that’s not fulfilling, is wasting at least 8 hours of your life on a daily basis without anything in return.
The goal of this project was to to measure the depth and magnitude of this problem among the “Step By Step” clients, a comprehensive assessment of the current solutions to decide if the institution should shift its focus on solving this problem.
Competitive analysis
The main goals of market research were:
Descriptive report of 111 competitors organizing them based on the solutions they’ve provided to this problem
Comprehensive analysis the top 10 competitors to assess market opportunities
I presented detailed information about the competitors, including:
A part of the top 10 competitors report
To ensure a comprehensive research, I came up with 4 main research methods:
The reason for using these methods was to make sure that no competitor stays out of our radar. We wanted to get our hands on all the solutions that are currently used to help people find a career that they’re passionate about.
The first two methods are usually used in SEO research methods. The last two helped us find resources to assess. For example, if we could find the competitors of our competitors, we could expand our research drastically. I wrote a report explaining all the solutions that I had found and a categorization of them.
A part of the descriptive report
Quantitative & Qualitative
The questionnaire was designed to gather information, including:
Since the institution provides career consulting service, we already had some initial findings and assumptions about the user’s problems. The goal of the survey was:
We received 166 responses.
I conducted 10 user interviews with users from the people who had responded to the survey. I wrote down a detailed script to have a semi-structured interview with a unified approach.
I did the interviews with the help of a note-taker. Each interview took about 50 minutes.
Here are the goals of the interview:
Deliverables
I used affinity mapping to synthesize and analyze the data that I’ve gathered.
I’ve handed in a report containing all the research insights including:
The analysis of user interviews led me to define 3 personas. The stakeholders wanted to know how much different the persona of this product would be from their current buyer persona. I crafted a detailed description of each persona, including the following data:
The decision was made..
From the day one, the stakeholders wanted to know if there’s a market opportunity for solving this problem. After careful consideration of my research results, they’ve decided to postpone the project and not to move forward with their product idea. The reasons for this decision:
The main challenge of this project was that even the stakeholders didn’t know what they want.
I tried to tell a tangible story out of numbers and analytics to help them decide weather to move forward with their product idea or not. That’s why I added the descriptive reports to my tool kit.
Managing the ambiguity of the exploratory research while keeping the stakeholders satisfied was the most important skill that I’ve learned.
At the end of the day, we need stakeholder buy-ins for our research activities and it’s an important skill to master.
Career coaching platform for stay-at-home parents
UX research ▪ Volunteer ▪ Tech Fleet
