The project
To redesign the National Career Service. A service which provides information, advice and guidance for jobseekers and those in work aged 18 and older. This is to help them manage their career and progress into learning, training and employment.
Methods
1:1 user explorative interviews
Journey mapping
Phase
Discovery
Primary users
Students, recently unemployed, parents returning to work, recently made redundant, long term unemployed and people wanting a career change.
What did I do?
• Interviewed users across the country (pop up research and structured interviews)
• Journey mapping
• Facilitated collaborative sessions (with the core team)
• Prototype testing
Using the insight from the interviews
I mapped our users on a matrix based on their knowledge and confidence regarding their career path. This helped us begin to understand what different user groups needed from a career service.
Visualising the user needs and journey of different users
Based on what we knew I created a physical map that demonstrated the needs of our personas and what will help satisfy them. It was used to facilitate several workshops the team discussed and validated the map.
The physical nature of the map (wool and post its) allowed us to modify it as and when needed. The map also uncovered several clusters highlighting how the needs of multiple personas could be addressed by a common solution.
After several amends were made I transferred the map into a digital version. This continued to be used by the team when discussing the different needs of our users and informed which needs they focused on first.
