UX CASE STUDY
A leadership community platform for young students in Africa
Role:
- UXR / UX Design
- UI / Identity Design
- Design Integration
Duration:
- 2 weeks - Research
- 3 weeks - Conception
- 3 weeks - Implementation
Team:
- 2 Project Managers
- 3 Web Developpers
- 2 UX/UI/Product Designers
THE CHALLENGE
Lack of social experience is the main limiting factor for young students in Africa when integrating the professional field
THE SOLUTION
SEP is a platform that helps young students and graduates in Africa to strengthen their skills and leadership by offering them guidance, mentorship and broadening their opportunities
Design Process
Download Design Process [PDF]
Research
The Kick-off meeting
We started the Research phase with a kick-off meeting with the two project managers in order to get a clear understanding of the BRD presented by the UM6P and the OCP Foundation and to set a vision for the research methodologies to use
Meeting Insights
In order to better understand the students’ needs, we decided to start with Preliminary research then move on to conduct Interviews with a group of students from the UM6P University
Quantitative Research
We started by conducting Preliminary research in the form of digital surveys with approximately 40 participants (students from UM6P).
Findings
Survey results expressed that there are many Pain Points that should be considered:
- The job-hunting phase is the most challenging part of their professional career
- The Absence of guidance makes it harder to deal with social requirements.
- The current way of finding offers and getting internship contracts with companies is not structured
- 70% had no previous professional experience which made the process intimidating
- Lack of soft skills during the interview and the work period poses a major problem for the students
Qualitative Research
Based on the preliminary research we conducted Interviews with a group of 10 students according to the Initial Research Plan. The main questions we needed to answer included:
- What are the Pain Points of the students and graduates during the job-hunt period?
- How do the Pain Points compare with each other in terms of difficulty and priority?
- What causes each of the Pain Points?
Understand
Interview Transcript Analysis
In order to add color to the UX Understanding phase, I started with analyzing the Interview transcripts to make use of all the collected data from the qualitative research by performing the following steps:
- Reading each transcript carefully (Biases excluded)
- Organizing the data using annotations
- Creating categories and subcategories by grouping annotations
- Understanding each data segment
- Constructing the result report
Key insights
Throughout my analysis, I discovered that young students have the following needs to get better on the personal and professional levels:
- Mentorship and guidance (learning by doing approach)
- Soft skills improvement for a better social engagement (a student resources system)
- A management system for jobs and internships (offers and requests)
- A contracts management system (to ease the applications follow-up)
User Personas
For the team to better understand who exactly we are designing for, and based on the research done, I started creating User Personas while keeping in mind the obligation to include the diversity of profiles, age and previous experiences
Download Example Personas [PDF]
Storyboards
To understand the flow of student’s emotions and pain points, and to get a clear sense of what is really important to them I sketched many scenarios to illustrate the experience they go through
Download Example Storyboard [PDF]
Ideate
Future-state User Journey
In the first phases of ideating and after understanding the young people’s pain points and objectives, we understood the “Why” and the “Who” so we needed to set up the “What”. We started with setting the Future - state user journey to know what needs to be built in order for the users to get to the objectives they want
The Process
I followed the next steps to identify the experiences a student should have when interacting with our product:
- Created a different Journey Map for each segment of the users
- Specified the phases each segment goes through
- Specified the swimming pools to consider
- Gathered the team and started the mapping workshop
Potential Solution
Based on all the previous processes, Pain Points and Opportunities, I started ideating some potential services that the solution should offer to meet the BRD and the students' expectations
Provides the youth with a wide range of jobs and internship offers to make the job-hunting period less stressful and less time consuming
The learning service will provide a great opportunity for the students to grow their knowledge, participate in events and engage with others
The SEP mentors will help the students to make informed decisions when it comes to entrepreneurship as well as work with them on their soft skills and share their experiences to help them grow
Online Contracts will make the process of applying and getting the position that the students are after more fast and clear, also it will help them make a well-informed decision in regard to their job choice
Information Architecture & Flow Chart
The IA represents the structural design of shared information environments, so it can provide better clarity for the project. Also, it will be a great tool in the coding phase since it will provide the dev team with a clear idea of the role of each component in the system
Branding & Identity Design
Download Branding Guide [PDF]
