ExplorIn — An Inclusive Career Development Tool, for Teens.
High school students are focused and determined individuals.
They are involved and skilled in many different extracurricular activities. Teens explore and expand on their interests and skills by interacting with video-based tools such as Youtube, TikTok, and Instagram.
Once senior year rolls around.. Teen’s are expected to have their careers interests, goals, AND future plan — all mapped out. Yep, every fall, seniors in high school are rudely awakened to the fact that they are almost adults, having to quickly plan their futures, with little time for consideration.
Some of our initial thoughts were that,
Teens need knowledge and guidance while career planning — to feel confident in their decision after graduation.
- Students do not consider their interests and future life plans early enough in high school to prepare for graduation readiness
- More and more students are considering different career paths other than college, but lack resources and knowledge on how to navigate these other career paths
- Future decisions are overwhelming for students because large investments are at stake
We set out to discover this reoccurring problem for teens — asking ourselves..
How might we encourage, educate, and guide high school students through the process of career planning, ultimately providing future readiness?
Our Process
To investigate this issue future, we followed a structured process to make sure we were leading a research-informed design investigation. We wanted to better understand teen’s major needs and challenges within future planning and experiences in high school — to understand the major problems we were trying to remedy. We wanted to ensure teens were able to explore different career path options, practice their skills while in school, and prepare a plan to guide their future efforts.
Methodology
Research — User Interview ( 6 teens | 20 questions) | Affinity Mapping (synthesizing themes + insights)| Persona (our target audience)| Journey Map (Empathize with our persona) | Business Evaluation (partnership and competitor insight)
Design — Feature Prioritization Matrix (ordered by “most essential + in scope) | MoSCow Map (Choose features that were “Must-Have”) | Design Studio (team sketching first design ideas) | Mid-Fi Mobile Wireframes (ideating design features into Figma) | Hi-Fi Clickable Prototype (created after using testing Round 1 feedback) | API’s (how are we providing this content to users?)
Iteration — Usability Testing | Score Card | Partnered with LinkedIn
Measurement — UX Analytics — KPI’s (how we can learn if our content is worthwhile to users and constantly improve their experience)
Affinity Mapping
To first uncover what teens are currently facing while planning for their future careers, 6 teens were interviewed and asked a total of 20 questions pertaining to challenges, methods, and behaviors while planning their future.
Methodology
- Recorded research findings + quotes onto sticky notes — color coded for each interviewee
- Group major findings into an Affinity Map to uncover basic categories or themes → turn themes into research insights
Some of the basic themes uncovered were decision-making challenges, preparing for the future, and future values and thought process. Also — support systems and learning preferences.
Our Persona
This is Mike. Mike represents our target audience. He is a 17- year-old high school senior who is eager to be done with school.
Mike still has no clue of what his passion is, nor what he wants to pursue post-graduation. He feels supported by his family and friends, but he is lacking guidance that will allow him to have a clearer vision of what his career-driven passion is.
At his school, they don’t offer students a helpful counseling service to learn about their next steps after graduating. He only really knows what his hobbies are and he’s not really good at anything in school in particular. Mike fears he has waited too long to look into his career path since he’s going to graduate this year and he has not started planning his future.
Mike’s Senior Year Fall Journey
To visually outline exactly how our persona, Mike, is feeling, while going through each stage of his senior year planning process, We introduce, Mike’s user journey — outlining highs and lows of his experiences.
Summers over, its senior year and Mike’s never been more sad to be again, starting another year of publicly-funded torture.
But.. as it turns out, Mike’s guidance counselor was expecting HIM to have already thought out his interests and career goals..
She didn’t have the time or resources to create a personalized future plan for 500 students in one year. Their conversation ended with generic, college-geared pamphlet that every other student before him… just got too. Sorry Mike.
Why doesn’t Mike just try LinkedIn?
Did you know that 50% of LinkedIn’s users have a college degree? With that, one of the smallest age ranges utilizing this tool both in the U.S. and globally is ages 18–24?
Why is it, that this age range, that most lacks professional connections and fundamental career skills, is not leveraging this massive network and content library? Well, if you ask us, it all starts on LinkedIn’s login page. You see this:
Right away, Mike is already thinking, “Welcome to my professional community? I’m not really a professional yet… I’ll come login when I get a job..”
There is a stigma you have to have experience to gain experience, on LinkedIn.
Refocusing Our Problem
At this point, we have validated our original thinking in that..
Students do need more knowledge and guidance while planning their future careers.
👉🏽 After discovering and defining who our users are so far, we refocus our design mission into three main feature categories. Career exploration, planning, and informational content.
Discover — ExplorIn.
Hello. We are ExplorIn. 👋🏽 We introduce our main features — both in low-fidelity, black and white designs + final, color designs. We have designed a native application, in order to engage with teen’s via notifications, as well as provide offline access — anytime, anywhere.
Here are mid-fidelity and hi-fidelity screen flows of how Mike would onboard and complete a basic task within our native application. Mike creates an account and inputs his interests by checking images with categories of topics.
Mike chooses a video from the “Explore” page and watches the video. Content is currently provided by Youtube API’s which are continuously updated by a development team to provide current and relevant feeds for each teen user’s interests.
Within the second round of design, video play icons were added, horizontal scrolling was implemented to allow for related search results, and the primary navigation include highlights on the Explore tab to indicate user location within the app.
Usability Testing
We analyzed 5 teens who completed four basic tasks, outlining any initial intuition or any major challenges teens faced while using our application.
Time on Task — how much time did the user take to complete each task?
Success — how directly was the user able to finish the task?
Easiness Rating — How easy was this task on a 1–5 scale?
The teens mainly had issues within tasks 1 and 4, including features on the “Explore” page and calendar. We created a list of design changes for our next round of design, for each page within our app.
ExplorIn — Career Development
As we have grown, we have developed a tool for students, like Mike, to select and explore their interests watching interactive videos and reading content. In the “Careers” page, Mike has already gone through, read the structured guide on how to get work experience and decided what kind of experience he wants to take part in this semester. Within his notes, he’s made To Do’s and completed tasks to prepare for his guidance meeting where they discuss school-partnered music internships.
Mike’s second guidance visit went much more smoothly. He’s already in contact with his music teacher, who knows of a sound engineer he could connect him with.
Getting experience is challenging and overwhelming for teens. ExplorIn is your guide, resource, and confidence that you will be ready for graduation — prepared for career success.
💥 📲 Mike downloaded ExplorIn and is so excited for YOU to try. Open it up and see just how powerful this tool really is.
Our Product Principles are plain and simple.
We are proposing to partner with the “world’s largest career developmental platform” — LinkedIn.
We want to introduce young, inexperienced, and disconnected users to this massive network and content library. Here, we want to utilize LinkedIn Learning API’s on our application’s “Explore” page, instead of Youtube — encouraging teens to create a LinkedIn account to start their future career planning.
Teens can use LinkedIn’s job-searching and networking features as they feel comfortable, but mainly use this tool in high school as a learning tool to understand who they are, who they want to become, and where to find information on how to make that happen.
Providing Value to LinkedIn…
- Increased user base by introducing teens to LinkedIn early
- By providing increased KPI feedback, outlining how well LinkedIn Learning’s content is communicated across their platform
- Expanding the age and experience ranges (within demographics KPI) of average LinkedIn users, by branding LinkedIn as a tool for ALL career-seekers
ExplorIn is LinkedIn’s next step towards landing users, as well as utilizing and improving their extensive career developmental content library .
In partnership, ExplorIn and LinkedIn create a career development path for ALL career-seekers — not just professionals.
Achieving Goals, Together
- We both realize that humans are busy, users need space to learn, but also take breaks in between.
Both of our visions align in that we want to provide resources for active learning, communication, and career exploration, anytime, anywhere.
- Our companies both utilize user history data to provide accurate and relevant search results, in order to help our users achieve their goals
We provide users the ability to access and expand their knowledge in various subject areas, while meeting new people within their career field to gain experience.
….
🌈 Fall in love with your future career on the ExplorIn mobile application.
📲 Mike downloaded ExplorIn and is so excited for YOU to try. Open it up and see just how powerful this tool really is.
