Mission Collaborative

Overview

PROCESS

Research

SECONDARY RESEARCH

SWOT and competitive analysis

We began by doing a SWOT analysis of Mission Collaborative and its industry and competitors, primarily focusing on the website and general offerings.

We then analyzed the competitive landscape, focusing on a few organizations that are similar to Mission Collaborative — we were primarily interested in their their website UIs, but also looked at the features that differentiated each. Overall, we found that the competitors had more developed sites and robust offerings.

Looking at previous research

We also received research that had previously been conducted on Mission Collaborative. This research was a few years old, so not all of it was relevant anymore, but it was still useful for gaining insights into Mission Collaborative’s audience base and how its website has evolved over the years.

Key Takeaways from Secondary Research

From our research, we pulled together recommendations for Mission Collaborative to optimize their existing site:

1. Update the global navigation so that it has more contrast with the hero image and consider adding a call-to-action to enroll in the program.

2. Use more bullets and block text when applicable — the site has a lot of text so it can be hard to digest content at times.

3. Add a section of information for university partners.

Aside from these recommendations, we found that the existing site was largely simple, aesthetic, and easy to use. Thus, we decided to look into possible ways to add to what they already had in order to achieve our goal of making an engaging place for its users to connect with each other and access their educational materials.

USER INTERVIEWS

What do career changers need? How can others help them?

The initial goal of our user interviews was to generate insights into the needs of people looking to change careers and how others in the professional development community can best help them.

In order to find the most relevant people to interview, we created a screener survey to screen for people who have gone through, are going though, or have assisted in a career change.

A total of 73 people responded to our survey and we found that the most commonly used resources by people undergoing a career change were professional networks, alumni networks, and career mentors.

Survey results highlighted the importance of networking and interaction in the career change process, validating Mission Collaborative’s need for a way to connect its community.

So, we decided to frame our interview questions around how people network and engage with each other online, whether professionally, personally, or through groups they belong to. Out of the 50 people from the survey who agreed to be interviewed, we chose 15 to speak to (see demographics of interviewees below). Here are some examples of the questions we asked:

• Have you ever reached out to someone you didn’t know to seek career advice? Why and what was that process like?

• What digital platforms (if any) do you use to meet new people? What do you like/dislike about them?

• What has been your experience using online tools for networking? Why do you use them? What is most helpful/unhelpful about them?

Synthesis

AFFINITY MAPPING

Synthesizing the data from our interviews

Once we finished interviewing, we synthesized the answers from our interviews into an affinity map, and grouped results by categories such as meeting/speaking online, in-person networking, wants and needs, and alumni/university connections.

Our main findings from affinity mapping were:

1. People see networking as a way to connect on a personal level. It doesn’t have to be strictly professional — it’s more about finding common ground and making a friend.

2. People are comfortable messaging others, but when it’s in a professional setting they’re less comfortable with it.

3. People like to utilize online platforms and forums in the career change process, but they feel like there are so many different sources/sites to go to for information, it’s hard to keep track of.

4. People who volunteer to mentor someone through a career change do it because they’ve gone through a similar experience and like the feeling of giving back.

We felt that a social portal (combined with some of the other ideas we thought up) would be effective because it would provide a single platform for both current and past Mission Collaborative members to communicate and engage with one another beyond the professional level. It could also hold content relevant to the career change program.

PERSONAS

Empathizing with Mission Collaborative users

The first persona we created was Tirley Shran, who represents a current fellow of Mission Collaborative. (A fellow is the name for people enrolled in their program).

Scenario: Tirley just finished a long day of work and wants to spend a few minutes on her Mission Collaborative work. She is curious how others decided on their new career path and wants to reach out to a few members of her cohort.

Another persona we created was Darius Atkins, who represents a Mission Collaborative alumnus, someone who has already gone through the career change program.

Scenario: Darius starts his morning responding to an email from a current fellow and wants to see if there’s anyone else in the program he can offer his advice to.

Ideate

USER FLOWS

What would our personas want to do on the site?

With our personas in mind, we sketched out multiple paths of potential user flows for our community portal, thinking about our specific users’ needs and what they would want to accomplish on our site.

These user flows show the login flow for new and existing users, and how a user would reach out to someone in the community or check their academic schedule.

SKETCHES & WIREFRAMES

Design studio to generate ideas

After mapping out our flows, we participated in a design studio activity in which we went through a couple rounds of sketching our designs individually, then sharing them, giving feedback, and iterating. At the end, we combined the best parts of all of our ideas to create our early-stage wireframes.

We took inspiration for our designs from popular social media/networking platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, but wanted to create a more streamlined solution to focus in on our users’ needs. We then used these sketches as a guide to build out our initial prototype in Axure.

Prototype & Test

USABILITY TESTING

Once we built our first-round prototype in Axure, we began the usability testing process

We conducted 2 sets of usability tests on our prototype over Zoom, for a total of 9 user tests (iterating on our prototype after each set of tests). Our main goal in testing was to see how people navigated the various features within the community portal and what they were thinking as they navigated. We were hoping to gain insights into the following:

• Is information organized in a way that helps users achieve their end goal?

• What do users like and dislike about the portal features and what benefits do they see in them?

• Are there features to develop upon further?

Here are some examples of the tasks we gave users:

Feedback & Iterations

The feedback and data we collected from usability testing helped to inform us of the strengths and shortcomings of our prototype.

We found that users liked the simple and straightforward design, but some aspects of the portal were a little confusing. Below are a few of the changes we made throughout our iterations.

• Our original homepage had three columns and functioned as a community “wall,” but users found the side columns to be unnecessary and make the page look busy. We also realized that people already have associations with what “wall” means in the context of social media, and that we could better communicate the purpose of our homepage by renaming it to “Posts From Your Groups.”

• We iterated upon the global navigation multiple times because users had a difficult time finding various features housed in the profile section. We created a dropdown so that the features were more clearly labeled, and changed “Profile” to “My Account” to better describe this set of features.

• We changed the people icons in our community listing to individual cards because we received feedback that the original image listing made it difficult to differentiate users from one another.

Final Prototype

Here is a link to our mid-fidelity prototype in Axure.

We are proud of our work, but a few things to keep in mind:

• This was our team’s first time using Axure (which had a beast of a learning curve).

• The prototype shows most of the portal’s functionalities, but not all of them — we have a spec doc that annotates functionalities that we wished we had more time to build out.

CONCLUSION

Next Steps

As with all design, there is much room for improvement and iteration on the final design we presented. Our recommendations for next steps:

1. Optimize the product for mobile and tablet (we prioritized a web product product because Mission Collaborative fellows access class from a laptop or desktop).

2. Add a direct message feature within the portal for ease of communication, rather than making users leave the portal to privately contact each other.

3. Create a higher fidelity prototype and test it on actual Mission Collaborative fellows and alumni, and continue to iterate.

Reflections

As someone going through the career change process myself, I strongly relate to the need for community and professional support through this uncertain time. I am grateful for the opportunity to have worked on a project that could positively affect other career changers’ experiences. Mission Collaborative is already doing a great job of providing guidance to their career change fellows, and I hope my team’s work will enhance their services even further!