PURPLE ELEPHANT careers

This project is starting the whole process almost from scratch: currently there is no existing website and my job is to help create one.

The process starts with preparing for an interview with a stakeholder Kelly. Elaborate list of questions, starting with the idea behind the name of the business, was prepared. We had an opportunity to discuss the functions of the project to be developed, intended benefit for the users, current stakeholder’s expectations and look into existing branding, as well as compare it to other professionals in same business field.

After examining the existing branding and receiving attributes that should characterize the product being developed, I decided to test the existing colors contrast on ADA compliance, and they did not pass.

By deepening the contrast of the original colors I got the new suggested colors and checked the results with the stakeholder to determine which one should become the main color. Number 2 was selected as a result.

Next, is the competitive analysis for other professionals in the same field who advanced a step further at this time and that Coach Kelli looks up to.

The stakeholder’s marketing strategy is not to include the prices on the company website, even though 2 other competitors display them. Other features that are not of the immediate importance, due to the lack of content, are blog and social media links. Kelli requested to leave them out of scope of current design sprint for now.

To work on the UX part of the project, we created survey, that consists of the following 10 questions:

1. What age group do you belong to?
2. Have you ever received career services in the past?
3. When looking for a new job, what part of the process do you find the most challenging?
4. What are some best practices you’ve done in the past to land the job you were aiming for?
5. What is the purpose of your career coaching needs?
6. What are some best practices you’ve done in the past to land the job you were aiming for?
7. When would you prefer to work with a Career Coach/Resume writer?
8. Do you use a template builder to create your resume?
9. What qualifications do you expect from your career coach/consultant?
10. How will you know that you have received quality career services?

Received career services in the past

Used a template builder to create resume

Qualitative data was aggregated in the form of affinity diagram.

The most challenging aspects of looking for a job and working with career coaches are found to be:

• Interviews and mindset
• Writing a presentation letter personalized for the specific role
• Finding a balance between confidence and arrogance.
  
• Finding openings relevant to my particular set of skills and finding out about jobs that aren’t publicly posted.
  
• Negotiating salary
  
• Being overloaded with information.

Users would prefer to work with a coach:

• If they feel their  resume needs improvement and polishing
  
• If it helps them land a job, yes!
  
• When they finally give up and decide I can’t do it themselves
  
• If they were having no luck on my own.
  
• When they need interview skills help
  
• For career change
  
• If their resume is not landing interview calls.
  
• When are looking for a different career path.
  
• When they are going for a job that is really important to them.

While understanding our users better, we can start empathizing with them. Let’s build an empathy map:

Empathy map will help us define our user persona.

User stories:

As an adult professional, who is not feeling fulfilled at the current position, I want to realize my career potential, so that I get a position that fully uses my knowledge, expertise and abilities.

As a website user, I want:

• To know what services may help me
• information about the company
• to be able to book an appointment
• feel confident about coaches professionalism
• to know that it is possible to achieve success
• to better understand the interview process

Problem statement

Purple Elephant was designed to help people gain clarity around their career goals and guide them to deliver the best results on their career journey. We have observed that the majority of individuals searching for a career change lack the knowledge, expertise, confidence or connections that are needed to land their desired career position, which is causing inadequate results.

Hypothesis Statement

We believe by creating a platform for purple elephant to showcase successful career growth and change management, will invite more clients to meet the coach to enhance their careers and change their lives. We will know we are right when the clients land the desired position and leave great testimonials.

While doing the above-mentioned research, we figured out that it is extremely important for people to have a simple, yet effective and efficient resource to help them reach out to career coach and thus get help achieving their career goals.

We need to create a site that will:

1. Introduce Coach Kelli to the user
2. Let the user know about the company
3. List what services they can get
4. Display testimonials to show track record of success
5. Make booking an appointment easy

The only page we did not have to design was the “Pick date and Time” appointment scheduling page, because Coach Kelli had already been using a third-party service for this purpose. After checking with our webdevs, it was confirmed to be possible to be integrated in our future design with the help of API’s or iframes.

Lo-Fi concepts helped us test the basic layouts of the pages. One of the things that was discarded during Lo-Fi testing – was the logo of the company on the “About us” page. Users preferred to see pictures of coaching process or emotions instead of just a logo on this page. They appreciated simple and minimalistic design that was easy to navigate through.

Mid-Fi testing showed us that the design is very simplistic as intended, but the tabs on the tab were distracting and not functional. We tried different captions for CTA buttons on the top and the button of the page, which made it also more confusing for the users. It was decided not to use “Work with me” wording because some of the users treated this as not using coaches services, but collaborating or being invited to be employed in her organization.

Quantitative testing results from Useberry service shown below:

Moodboard helped us set the emotional tone of website’s color pallette.

 Coloring the Mid-Fi’s into designated color palette has become very challenging and we did not get the same positive feedbacks about the qualities of the site after coloring, so we had to tweak the menu and the shape of the header to keep website modern, encouraging and elevating. 

We added the microinteraction for the “About us” menu item to reveal “Company”, “Biography” and “Testimonials” on click. Those are the common aspects of businesses credibility.

See the Hi-Fi Figma prototype by following the link.