SkillSync

1. Prototype link (Please submit a link to a playable prototype, not a link to your design file) [https://www.figma.com/proto/1Y2InVRkfaMJX6qQalwlpY/Designathon-Board?page-id=0%3A1&type=design&node-id=30-1282&viewport=249%2C761%2C0.12&t=6Yvqynn9ym7HRGNA-1&scaling=scale-down&starting-point-node-id=116%3A6233&show-proto-sidebar=1&mode=design]

2. Describe your project (max 150 words) SkillSync is a design solution powered by AI intended to guide and assure undergrad students who are feeling uneasy about their career path. The goal of this app is to grant students easy accessibility to the guidance that many do not receive and give them more security in the path they have chosen to walk professionally. We found that it was extremely common for undergrad students to be unsure of what career path to take and we wanted to provide a service that could provide them with the necessary information to create informed decision in regards to their professional outlook.

3. Describe your research process and findings. If you conducted any surveys or interviews, please include the survey form and/or interview questions here. If you conducted secondary research by pulling from online sources, please include a link to your sources. (Max 500 words) Our research process began with asking multiple friends what problems they have faced in their undergrad experience. This was a part of our empathize phase, and we had to decide between two common problems that students faced. One was the lack of easy to navigate university health services and the other was the existential anxiety regarding what students want to do with their careers and the lack of guidance on this subject. We chose the second option since we believed there was more potential for design and we all knew of someone that had to deal with uncertainty regarding their major choice or their career path. We started researching statistics to evaluate if this was a common problem and our question was answered when we found out that 80 percent of college students end up switching their major at least once. We decided to conduct an interview with someone we knew that switched majors. Here are some of the following questions that we asked: “What were the main feelings you felt in regards to your major/career choice?”, “How did you choose what major to switch to?”, “What was this process like for you?”, “How easy or difficult was this process for you?”. The responses to these questions helped guide the creation of our user persona, which was instrumental to the design of our final product. During our design process we also had to research multiple careers and industries as well as their financial and market statistics. These are the following online sources we used to aid us design our product. https://www.bls.gov/ https://utulsa.edu/news/normalizing-the-norm-of-changing-college-majors/#:~:text=As%20a%20practical%20matter%2C%20about,course%20of%20their%20college%20career.

4. Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions? (Max 500 words) The design decision we spent the most time developing was the integration of the SkillSync feature, since this was the main attraction of our app. Throughout this whole process, we created a user persona based off of research we conducted. We designed this feature to accommodate the needs of our user persona. We knew that the end goal was to create something that would help guide an unsure undergrad student in regards to finding their ideal career path. We created multiple "how might we statements" which helped guide our design process. We decided that we would integrate AI into our app to be able to curate industry and career information based on what the user selects as interests or traits. We then thought of including a "match" score, which would show the user their compatibility percentage in relation to an industry or career path. Now the questions we asked ourselves was “How might we display useful and concise information to the user?”. We thought of a card system to be able to display the information in a concise manner. Once the user gets their industry matches, the user would be able to expand the industry cards they’re interested in, and at the bottom there would be career cards that the user could expand for more in-depth information. Each card would have a ring that would show the match percentage, which was a visualization method that we chose since it shows match “progression” easily. So ok, at this point we had the information delivery system ready, but now we had to decide what time of information would go on the cards. We took a basic approach at description formatting by using the “who, what, where, why, and how” format and we streamlined this information description template to “who, what, and how”. What is the industry/career, who are the type of people in these industries/careers (their interests), and how does someone get involved in a career (popular majors). The last major decision we made was figuring out how we would implement a card saving feature. We understood that users would want to keep industry/career cards that they found interesting or helpful, but the challenge was how we would integrate a save feature. We started thinking about the cards as if they were physical, and thought that having a deck of cards would be a cool way of integrating a save feature. We decided that there would be a bookmark bottom at the top corner of the cards and you would be able to access your deck of cards in the profile section.

Built With

• figma