Blog Diary

Introduction

As a student doing a master’s in Web Design and Content Planning from the University of Greenwich, I started to approach the world with a different perspective which is to understand better designs, discuss them with friends, and appreciate them. User Experience is an area which I’m really concerned about. User Experience and Design are really connected together for the best experience and feel for the user, be it a website or any other product.

There are different kinds of approaches for understanding the experience of users in the real life. I will be describing how user experience and design are applicable in my project.

Project Idea

Proposed Name: CHOOSE

Dear Children, were you born to be an engineer or a doctor? Are you being driven by your parents’ passion? Are you afraid to follow your passion to achieve your dream job? There are numerous opportunities in each passion. Be who you are, follow your passion. Use CHOOSE to find out the end-to-end requirements and benefits of each career path you wish to take.

Dear Parents, is your career aligned with your passion? Or is it different from your career? Do you think it would have been better for you if you had chosen to follow your passion? Don’t force your children to follow your passion. Use CHOOSE to discover the passion in your child, see how he should be going in order to achieve his passionate career. You can also understand how many people are not happy with their career only because it is not what they wished for.

I really think this is happening in the real world. There are children who are forced to take a particular course because their parents want them to. Let’s give the children what some of us didn’t have, Freedom to CHOOSE their passionate career path.

Features

• Understand the passion of children.
• Show them the whole career path along with some assessment elements like salary range, course fee details, scholarships, etc
• See the different Universities offering particular courses. 
• See the different jobs associated with each course.
• See job insights, salary range of each job.
• See the requirements of each job. This helps you understand what all technologies or skills you should possess to get that particular job.

Possible features in the later phase

• Record the daily routine of the children, assess them based on their daily routine. 
• Record their child memories or achievements.
• Encourages parents by listing various opportunities of extra curricular activities.

User Research

Research Objective

To understand the current situations of people around the world, I decided to create a survey collecting some basic pieces of information which includes their passion, age, gender, and their job category. My research objective was to gather the passion and profession of some random user groups and analyze how many users are working in their own passionate careers. I decided to create this survey to understand if the people are happy with their current job and if they are passionate about their current career.

I used SurveyMonkey for creating the survey, but I don’t recommend using that tool since they have limitations for the response for the free tier. They won’t let us see the results after 40 responses. I’d rather suggest using Google Forms which doesn’t have any restrictions and also has the basic features for conducting a survey.

From the survey, there were more than 85 responses as of now. But since I can’t access the responses beyond 40, let’s have a look at the conclusions.

• Gender
  • 77.50% of the submissions were Males
  • 22.50% of the submissions were Females

• Age Group
  • 80% of the submissions fell in the age group of 25-34
  • 17.5% of the submissions in the age group of 18-24

• Passion
  • 50% of the submissions says they are passionate in Sports/Games.
  • 40% of the users are passionate about Technology/Softwares/Hardware
  • 30% of users have passion in Arts/Design/Music/Dance.
  • Some percentage of the users are passionate about other things like Literature, Business, Politics.

• Job Category
  • 67.5% of users are working in IT/Technology/Hardware/Software sectors.
  • 7.5% of users work in Business, Sales each.
  • 5% of users are working in Accounting/Finance sectors.
  • 5% of users are unemployed.
  • 2.5% of users work as professional Sportsperson/Football Player/Cricket Player.

65% of users say that they will choose a profession that is related to their passion even if the remuneration is not up to their current one. The rest 35% say they won’t choose passion over their career if the remuneration is less. But in the real world, a recognized sportsperson would be earning a lot more than what normal people things.

From the above results, we can come to a conclusion that even though people have different passions which they could have pursued, they end up in a profession in which they are not much passionate.

See the survey results for your reference.

Target Audience

Even though all the survey participants were of the age above 18 years, the real target audience of the website is children. The website aims to give the children a variety of opportunities from choosing an academic course to getting a professional job related to their passion. The parents are also considered as a target audience since they can use the website to find the appropriate courses/universities/career path for their children.

User Needs

Children

• As a child, I want to choose a school/university so that I can participate in sports/games.
• As a child, I want to choose a school/university which offers different scholarships for talent in music/dance.
• As a child, I want to pursue my passion so that I can get a career that I’m passionate about which will make me happy during my professional period.

Parents

• As a parent, I want to find the passion in my child and choose a corresponding course/university for my child.
• As a parent, I want to analyze the insights of a particular job which my child can start working on.
• As a parent, I want to record my child’s achievements in his. passion, for example, a trophy in a football match, or in a dance competition.
• As a parent, I want to use my child’s profile to showcase the achievements/certifications to a University so that my child will be given scholarships.

Business Needs

As of now, I have not finalized whether I need to monetize the website or not. If I decide I want to monetize, I’m planning to approach different schools/universities since I will be displaying courses and university details. Also planning to approach the Government as well since this is also a solution to a common problem.

1 – 1 Session

I spoke to one of my friends who is also a developer, he gave me some suggestions like, when listing jobs we could link them to LinkedIn jobs, Indeed or any third-party sites where those jobs are linked. He also suggested a way to collect the data to display on the website from any career guidance professionals, since we are ultimately automating their job in our website which is letting the children/parents choose a wise career path that is the best for their children or themselves.

Assumptions

• Most of the children are afraid to follow their passion and choose a career which is coupled with their passion because they are not aware of the different opportunities they are having around them.
• If we provide a list of opportunities/courses related to their passion, I believe that most of them would try to pursue their passion. We will be showing the different job opportunities if a particular course is chosen.
• Most parents tell their children from a very early age what they should be achieving in their life rather than finding their passion and showing them the right path they should take.

Usability

Parents/children will be using the website and on the signup itself, we will be collecting information such as passion, age, interests so that we could suggest the related courses/schools/universities for the children. The parents will also be able to see the different jobs associated with the particular course as well as what all technologies or skill the child should possess in order to acquire those jobs. I plan to test the prototype using the parents in my family itself since there are some parents still who believe their children should become an engineer or a doctor if they need to be successful.

Questions to gather context

• What is your passion?
• What is your job category?
• Did you have any extra curricular activities during your education?
• Are you happy in your job?
• Is your child scoring well in his academics? If not what are you going to do about it?
• Have you ever wished you studied at a different school/university because your school/university didn’t have a particular sports/games training?

User Centered Design

I intend to develop a design user-centered. I’m a person who wishes I had opportunities for cricket training during my childhood. I studied in a school where there was a small space for children, we can’t even call it ground. But the school was really great in the academic brilliance though. But I believe a student should be given opportunities in every aspect of life, not only academics. So, I have started to think like the student inside me 10 years ago and started thinking of the user flow in which the website should be designed.

I will also give the website to some other parents and children for gathering feedback on usability, simplicity, design, understandability, etc. There are some third-party products that can be integrated with websites that record the user’s flow, for example, Hotjar. I would probably use that one as well so that I can see how the user interacts with my website and analyze how fast they perform the actions.

User Journey Map

Parents

1. Parent signs up into the website
2. They will be given some questionnaire to be completed as part of the signup.
3. The questionnaire will be mainly related to their childrens’ passion/interest.
4. Their age will also be asked so that they can be given appropriate suggestions.
5. After completing the questionnaire, they will be shown a list of universities and courses that might match the profile of their child.
6. The parent will be able to choose one university/school/course to see more detailed information regarding the same.
7. After choosing/clicking on a course from a particular school/university, the parent will be shown the next level suggestions like a higher education or jobs related to those courses, likewise.
8. When the parent chooses a job, they will be shown a list of skills/technologies the particular job characterizes. Also more insights like salary range of a particular job will be shown.
9. There will be another section for the parents to record their child’s acheivements/rewards, like upload a certificate, upload a photo of the trophy their child received during a football match. This feature will be added in the later stages of the application, it won’t be part of the initial release.

Children

1. Child signs up into the website.
2. There will be another set of questionnaires for the child to complete as part of the signup.
3. They will be asked about their passion/interest/age.
4. They willl be shown the same as parents user flow, only difference is that they will be able to understand and choose their career path themselves.

Data Collection

This is a difficult phase of my project. I’m thinking of implementing this website in Kerala, India during my initial release. I have decided to contact the education ministry for information on various courses and colleges in Kerala. And for the job listing section, for the initial release, I’m thinking of diving into LinkedIn and doing the search manually for different kinds of jobs and showing the links.

Conclusion

User Research and User Experience Design have played a great role in making my website better in every aspect. I think there are a lot of other tools and methods to gather information and feedback from the users. I hope to use the necessary ones in the later stages of my website.