CareerWings E-Learning App — A UX Case Study

An e-learning app created to help students to get the right direction where they are good at and to aware them about existing career options.

Hello and welcome to an another episode of case studies where this time I have brought excerpts from a Hackathon I participated in, earlier this year. This awesome event was conducted by Growth school (Do check out their website if you want to accelerate your design learning and hone some other skills) I would also like to thank my cool team members Harsha, Harshmita, Jayalakshmi and Vennela for making this Hackathon fun where we were praised for the quality content by the jury. Alright let’s run to the main content!!

P.S- I refined and created some UI screens after the event which were left out due to time constraints.

Problem Statement:

10th & 12th-grade students are usually unclear about their career path as there are so many new fields of profession every day. An e-learning app wants to help students understand the direction map of what they are good at and what they are studying to existing career options and at the same time allowing parents to track their ward’s progress and help them choosing the right path.

This was the PS we chose out of the 8 given and were feeling quite motivated to take a challenging statement and soon realized that this challenge has been taken by 7 out of 10 teams already! (egg on our face)

🤔Rationale for choosing the topic:

1. Relatable Topic: We also faced a similar issue growing up and believe the right career guidance is a must for a better future.
2. Market Gap: There are a plethora of apps available in the market but they only focus on education and do not pay any attention to career counselling.
3. Empathetical Reason: Students are most of the time confused whether to stick with secure careers or make a career as per their talents/interests.
4. Competitive Edge: One spends almost most of one’s lifetime working. The proper career guidance ensures that the career chosen is the right one and thus results in emotional, social and financial happiness.
5. Pain Point: Parents still do not understand the unconventional or offbeat careers as there is not much knowledge provided to them thus do not allow their children to even choose them.
6. Genuine Reason: Last but not least we want to break the shackles that if you are born in India the only 2 secure careers are of an engineer and a doctor.

Gearing up for the event…

Hackathon’s work on a very tight deadline. It is all about producing the most viable solution in the least possible time (48 hours in our case) using the best resources available at hand. We did not want to get overwhelmed with the amount of work to be done and also wanted to get the best possible results in the available time. Hence we needed something to stay on track and time.

To ensure that the timelines are matched without any fail, we also introduced 2 timekeepers to motivate the team and finish the work on time.

1. Choosing Problem Statement (Day 1)(3 hours) — Since it is a must and ample time should be devoted to it, we gave it sufficient time and completed this task well in time.
2. Deciding on responsibilities (Day 1)(30 mins) — As they say with great power comes great responsibility.
3. Preparing for Presentation for Review 1 (Day 1) (90 minutes)
4. Desk Research (Day 2) (3 hours) — Though in such time specific events it is tricky to come up with insightful articles but we collected whatever we could lay our hands upon.
5. Primary Research (Day 2) (4 hours) — Again requires good investment of time but we decided to lay emphasis on it as a good research acts as a strong backbone for the design.
6. Interviewing People (Day 2) (4 hours) — Initially a subject of conflict this eventually got a nod as we already knew who our target audience is!
7. Deciding on HMW (How might we) questions (Day 2) (30 minutes) — How we could reframe the problem statement?
8. Wireframing and Prototyping (Day 2) (7-8 hours) — Covered both the Low and the High Fidelity ones after the initial paper one.
9. Preparing for Presentation for Review 2 (Day 2)(90 Minutes)
10. Testing stage (Day 3) (2 hours) — We sent our wireframes to the users we interviewed and received their feedback.
11. Video Preparation (Day 3) (4 hours) — We were asked to showcase our findings, research, design via a 7 minutes long video by screen recording.

📝Desk Research:

Before starting with this, we also deduced a research problem statement so that we are clear where we need to head!

Research Problem Statement

With the plethora of opportunities available, students are usually unclear about their career path. Make an experience inside an e-learning app focusing on the points which can make their career choice easier by introducing self awareness, future prospects and can also convince their parents that their ward is on the right path of choosing a career.

📌Source 1

What is the current career counseling market in India?

1. Almost 92% of the students in India do not get career guidance at the right time.
2. There is an absolute gap in providing the right career guidance to students at a very young age.
3. Every month there are close to 1 lakh people who search for career counselling online.

📌Source 2

How to start a career counselling business in India Next Gen 2020-21?

1. Target Audience for career counselling business- or school going students, target audience is not students but parents who make their decision.
2. Career Assessment should be highly accurate and reliable, multidimensional and should have different types of assessment for different age group.
3. Areas to assess: Career Interest, Career Personality, Career Motivators, Learning Style, Aptitude and Emotional Quotient.
4. Students should have information on: Colleges, New Age career option, Exam related information and Application progress report.

📌 Source 3

93% Indian students aware of just seven career options: What are parents doing wrong?

1. Staggering 93% of the students aged 14 to 21 were aware of just seven career options though there are more than 250 different types of job options available in India.
2. Many people who either choose a career path similar to what their friends want, while some go for the option suggested by their relatives or neighbors.
3. In India, students face parental pressure to opt for conventional careers such as engineering, medicine, law, civil services etc.

📌 Source 4

Career counselling and its importance for school students

1. Career counselling should be done in the school itself for class 9–11 students specifically because these are the levels where students choose a particular stream as their specialization.
2. Psychometric tests to analyze interests of students.

👉The 5 W’s

💡Key Takeaways from Desk Research:

1. Commonly chosen career paths in India are Law, Engineering, Medicine, Accounts and finance, Computer applications and IT, and management.
2. 93% of the students aged 14 to 21 were aware of just seven career options though there are more than 250 different career options.
3. School teachers, parents, friends and mentors will all be the part of the decision making process when it comes to a child deciding on his/her career.
4. Many people who either choose a career path similar to what their friends want, while some go for the option suggested by their relatives or neighbors.
5. Family pressure on some people to choose a particular career path when they cannot decide on their own.
6. The ideal age to start considering career counseling is 13–14 years where they start with subject exploration and selection and then work towards career selection.
7. 60% students were not sure of what technologies to learn and courses to enroll for to enhance their career.
8. Every month there are close to 1 lakh people who search for career counselling online.

📝Primary Research:

• Skipping the user recruiting form was the need of the hour. Going ahead with it would have meant that we would need to create 3 different recruiting forms since the questions for each would have been very different. (We did start attempting it, but soon stopped once we had a glance at the ticking clock)
• We decided to interview friends of friends directly based on the Target users defined.
• For recruiting a career counsellor, we decided to post on LinkedIn and find someone from its network (Thankfully we connected with a very qualified via personal connections)

Based on the insights gathered, this was our target user group for students, parents and for career counsellors:

👉Insights Collected

💡Analyzing the interviews:

So primary research surprised us as we were proven wrong in our assumption that parents do not allow their children to choose a specific career, on the contrary they try to support their ward. So we decided to have a better analysis by using User Personas and Empathy Map

Rationale for choosing these User Personas:

• We identified two sets of trait differences from the students that we interviewed.
• We choose the third persona of a parent.
• We choose to skip the counsellor interview due to time restrictions. We had conducted the user interview to understand their perspective, however we did not have enough time to take it forward. This step can be taken up in future research.

😃Understanding better with an Empathy Map:

• Even though we identified multiple insights from the research we wanted to sum up our learning from engagements with people.
• Empathy map provided four major areas in which to focus our attention on, thus providing an overview of a person’s experience.

💡Deducing HMWs:

1. How might we give the right counselling to the students and help them in choosing the right career path?
2. How might we help the students in improving a particular skill set to pursue their dream career?
3. How might we educate the parents about the possible career options available?
4. How might we educate them about the pros and cons along with the possible growth related to these off-stream career opportunities?
5. How might we make the parents feel secure about a particular career opportunity?
6. How might we counsel the students and make them understand that their parents want the best for them?
7. How might we provide support to the parents and make them comfortable in sharing their opinions with the counsellor?
8. How might we design training sessions for parents and children together to listen to and understand their point of view and instill discussions among them?

💡Solutions which we will work on…

The HMW questions gave us a good starting point to come up with some solutions. We listed the common ones and the essential requirements collected from the user persona, empathy maps and HMW. We identified ideas which might solve those pain points and work as potential solutions. We all got together on Miro and started documenting our ideas together.

After a good round of brainstorming these were the solutions that were shortlisted on the basis of their priority and impact. The ideas were further clubbed together for the ease of introducing them in the wireframes.

👉Userflow:

🎬Wireframe:

We made low-fidelity wireframes on Whimsical to express our ideas in the most efficient matter within the time constraints.

👉Sign-In/ Sign Up Screens

We made 4 screens of Sign up and sign in, along with a screen of choosing a language in order to help wider audience of students and parents.

👉Onboarding Screens

• The first onboarding screen asks what type of user is interacting with the app
• The Next screen asks the career preference of the student and is visible only to them
• Third screen is a help screen
• The final screen is shown to students as well as parents so that they can see all lists of counselors and choose one from them.

👉Students Dashboard

• The first screen is the Students HOME which will give access to all options to the student on a single screen.
• Next is videos section where student can find all the videos related to the career path he has chosen, he can also like, dislike, bookmark, share, download and bookmark the videos.
• Next up is the Resources screen which will have multiple options to choose from, the next two screens show the resources in detail.
• Then we have the Edit profile and settings section.
• The student can also see the mentors screen where he can select from the wide range of mentors by using various filters.
• Last is the quiz section where he can appear in various quiz.

👉Parents Dashboard

• The First screen for Parents has the similar look as of students with just a difference of options available.
• Next is videos section where parents can find all the videos related to the career path their child has chosen,
• They can also like, dislike, bookmark, share, download and bookmark the videos.
• Next up is the Resources screen which will have multiple options to choose from and will also reflect the choices of their children.
• Parents can also see the mentors screen where they can select from the wide range of mentors by using various filters.

👉Mentors/Counselor Dashboard:

• The First screen for Mentors/counselors has the similar look as of parents and students with just a difference of options available.
• Next screen is of videos where they can see & create videos by “Make a video” button
• The last two screens of edit profile and settings are same as of students and parents.

🎬User Interface:

So I decided to make a video of the Prototypes in order to show how does a user interacts with it in real time.

👉Common Screens

👉Student Screens

👉Parent Screens

👉Mentor Screens

👉Research Limitations

• We were little thrown out of track due to the user groups we interacted and deducing the best solutions for them, we think we could have invested less time in research.

👉Future Scope

• We could have invested more time in area of the counselors and mentors but due to less time just spoke with one.
• We thought about making it an app for specially abled kids as well but that would have been a whole together newer work flow thus avoided it but are really motivated about this idea in the coming time.

🎬All right then….that’s a wrap! See you very soon!

Looking forward for your feedbacks and if you like this study don’t forget to hit that clap button multiple times!