EverWonder

How might people find the right job for them?

Key Skills: STRATEGY; UX WRITING; BRANDING & STYLE GUIDE; FORM DESIGN

 Our client, EverWonder, wanted our team to develop a service in which career changers could gain insight about different careers from the people in them. Their initial plan was to create a job-shadowing service similar to Airbnb Experiences focused on people entering the tech industry in Chicago.

Our research took us in many different directions, and in the end, we created a social network site that would better meet the needs of the target users and expand the company’s audience.

The Team: Ashlea Blunt, Jeremy Cadiz, and Karen Viado

My Role: Research Planning; Survey Creation; Interviewing; Synthesis; Strategy; Ideation; Sketching; Wireframing; User Testing; Presentation Deck Creation

The Problem

Millennials switch jobs more than any generation before them. Why do they change and how could EverWonder help people find the work that’s right for them?

Through our research, we found that the biggest reason people change jobs—whether to different companies or to completely different careers—was lifestyle and culture factors. A teacher stopped teaching because of the politics of the school system. A veteran designer wanted to switch companies because they wanted shorter hours than a startup provided.

To understand lifestyle and culture fit, job-seekers sought insight from other people to understand what a career, job, or company was like. But, reaching out to people was anxiety-inducing to everybody, especially for people who were new to an industry and didn’t have a network yet.

The Solution

A better social network. LinkedIn may be the necessary tool for job-seekers, but people felt like they were going into a job interview every time they used the site. We created a resource that would instead focus on people’s experiences in a job or company, not their work experience. We let people ask important questions, without feeling like they were their resume.

Cold-contacting strangers was a major hurdle to job-seekers. When they sent messages, they worried about being a burden or being ignored. We built a site where all users could say whether they were open to communicating with someone and how (phone calls, job shadowing, coffee chats, etc.), taking the guesswork out of an already stressful situation.

The Process

Why Do Millennials Switch Jobs?

All three members of the design team were career changers, so we were able to call upon our own experiences and had access to a large group of career changers to research.

We started with a competitive business analysis of not only job shadowing services, but all resources job-seekers used to find information on a job or career, including networking products like LinkedIn and BumbleBizz, event sites like Meetup.com, mentoring services, jobs sites like Glassdoor, paid membership networking groups like Six Degrees Society, and tech bootcamps like General Assembly.

We first approached this project as a service design project, but soon found that we would have to pivot from this.

Career Changers: Why are people unhappy in their current careers and how do they find work that fulfills them?

“Hosts”/Mentors: What would entice someone to share their experiences in a job or at a company? What makes someone interested in mentoring others?

HR Execs/CEOs/SMEs: How do companies find people who are the right fit? Why do people become unhappy in their jobs or careers?

Is it the career or the job or the company?

Career-changers wanted career insight and mentorship from people they trusted. So, we thought EverWonder could pivot from job-shadowing to mentorship pairing.

However, mentees didn’t want to pay and mentors didn’t want to be paid. Mentorship relationships were built over time.

Also, the “mentors” we interviewed switched jobs fairly often, even if they loved their career. They sought jobs for better culture fit or because of lifestyle needs (like shorter hours or smaller companies). How could a solution benefit career-changers and established professionals?

The need for a culture fit as the key to a happy employee-employer relationship was underscored by HR Executives, CEO’s and Subject Matter Experts.

Personas: Our client also wanted us to create user personas for the project. Instead of the traditional personas, we took two interviewees (a career changer and an established professional) and documented their needs, pain points, and history.

Since people change jobs at all phases of their careers, our solution needed to provide value for career starters, career changers, and career veterans.

In addition, we found that noting ALL of the feelings that our interviewees talked about regarding changing jobs and careers was important to our goal.

We knew our solution needed to provide value for people at any point in their career, whether they wanted to research a completely new career, a pivot in responsibilities, or a different company.

There were several ways to do this and meet our design principles and we ended up with a mountain of great ideas.

Evaluating Solutions Using 3 Frameworks

We also spent time creating a basic style guide for the company, believing that would dictate the structure and tone of the site. The style guide was based on:

1. Focusing on the optimism of finding a new job that’s fulfilling.

2. A professional, yet laid back feel. We didn’t want users to feel like they were going into a job interview when visiting the site.

3. Highlighting people’s experiences at a job or company, not their work experience. That way, all users would be more equal on the site, regardless of job titles.

When people use LinkedIn, they feel like they’re in a job interview. How could EverWonder create a better experience for job-seekers looking for information?

The Solution: A Better Social Network

EverWonder became a responsive website where users could be connected to people who could provide them with real, honest information about a job or company without the stress of cold-contacting strangers.

1. Onboarding: Users fill out forms with personal information, their career interests, and a history of the places they’ve worked (which they can choose to keep private or not). They also choose how they want to connect with people (coffee meetings, texts, etc.)

2. The Career Cohort: Users are given a career cohort of people who have similar interests and/or experiences. These are other users who are expecting to be contacted by the individual.

3. Message Templates: Users can contact other members of the site who aren’t in their career cohort, also. The site provides information about commonalities between the user and the person they want to contact. It also provides a pre-made message that can be edited and personalized if needed.

The Landing Page

The one page that caused the most difficulty was also the most important one: the landing page. Since EverWonder is a new business, we had to convey their value to potential users and explain what it was…without overwhelming visitors.

Our first iteration tried to capture visitors’ attentions with possibilities, while also explaining the main features of the site. Through testing, we found this caused an emotional shift in visitors, from optimism and hope to overwhelming confusion.

The next iterations tried to simplify the landing page and hold onto that feeling of optimism while still providing necessary information.

The final landing page focused on how EverWonder stands out from other career resources. It boiled the objective of the website and company down to its core essence and invited the visitor to learn more with a simple call to action button.

Future Iterations: Tackling Accessibility Issues

The orange text on white background (and vice versa) failed WCAG 2.1 AA standards, so we relied on bolding the text to highlight the benefits instead of color.

We also included a preferred pronouns field for people to choose how the site referred to them.

We wanted to create guideposts posts for users to indicate how far they were in the questionnaire. It became a progress bar with fill, color, and checkmarks confirming how much the user completed.

Creating Value for the User and Business

Revised Prototype Made with InVision