UX Design – Newly4

Newly4 is a responsive website project, thinking about contributing to society. The idea, therefore, is an application and site to search for jobs for recent graduates. This time I thought of a project for the region I live in, Portugal.

Portugal has a large amount of labor leaving the country with higher education, not only due to lower wages but also due to the lack of incentive programs and tools that help in the search for the first job. So, the goal is Create a platform specializing in employment in the country to help new graduates find jobs.

I used research carried out by universities across the country to understand the profile of students and select some them to be interviewed. Most of them demonstrate frustration with the lack of job opportunities in the country, but especially with the lack of government support in the search for opportunities. Writing the curriculum also appears as a problem, especially when there is no effective experience in the area in which the student is graduating.

Responsabilities

Conducting interviews, paper and digital wireframe, iterating on designs, user research and prototyping 

Persona

The process of creating the persona was focused on the female audience. 54% of university students are female, a relatively small difference but highly representative in courses such as medicine, law and science courses.

Competitive Audit

An audit of some competing applications provided guidance on gaps and opportunities to be addressed with Newly4.

Linkedin is the leader in the job market, combining search with a social network. In Portugal we have employment platforms, but none of them are focused on recent graduates. In general, the search is carried out by area, but the identification of the first opportunities is very much at the discretion of the surveys. In general, the first opportunities are sought at the universities themselves, often through unpaid work.

Ideation

Through ideation exercises, i analyze the competitors and try to improve the features to bring a simpler platform focused on the new graduate.

`Digital Wireframes

After brainstorming and sketching some paper wireframes, I created the initial designs for the Newly4 app. These designs focused on calling the user to the virtual resume assistant and job search.

Low-fidelity prototype

To prepare for usability testing, I created a low-fidelity prototype that connected the virtual assistant user flow and the app’s main categories.

Usability study

With the low fidelity prototype ready, I went after the case study. I saw some studies and videos about university education in Portugal and through acquaintances, I reached 7 students to carry out the study. The interview are remote and individuality with students recently graduated in Portugal. I found 3 main points to be analysed:

• Resume: People find it difficult to write a resume, especially when they don`’t have professional experience.
• Jobs to recent graduates: As they do not have vacancies highlighted for recent graduates, the search on other sites turns out to be more laborious.
  
• Notifications and calendar: To Have notifications and calendar is not essential despite not being present in competing apps. One opportunity is to work on the return of companies to participants in selection processes.
  

Mockups

After usabilty study, i opted for a hamburguer meny instead of the menu at the end of the app, because is more clean to navegate.

High-fidelity prototype

The high-fidelity prototype followed the same user flow as the low-fidelity prototype, including design changes made after the usability study. You can acess this prototype here: https://www.figma.com/file/o6rPXYYwgXEv3yIcf8y1ts/NEWLY4-MOCKUP?type=design&node-id=0%3A1&t=Zd7RoBn1eOR0hdpJ-1

Responsive Designs

Takeaways and next steps

Users shared that the app made food waste seem like something they could actually help reduce. One quote from peer feedback was that “the Food Saver app helps bring caring about the environment to a personal level in a way that’s easy and engaging.

I learned that the inclusion of calendars and notifications, despite not being present in all competitors, is something unnecessary since users already use other calendar tools such as google, which already issue notifications. I decided to keep it in the project but it is essential that it is aligned with google calendar or another application of this kind on smartphones.

Next steps:

1 – Conduct research on how successful the app is in reaching the goal to reduce food waste.

2 – Add more educational content (present only on the website, desktop version).

3 – Search for partnerships with employing companies and apply interviews regarding the difficulties in returning responses to users.