UX Designer | Human Computer Interaction
Scholastic Associates Program Page Redesign
Intern Project
PROJECT BACKGROUND
Our team of seven interns were given the redesign of the Associates program page to manage.
The current page was entirely text, lacking any branding, and we were told that we could completely overhaul it.
As the only design intern, I was responsible for both research and design. However, design was not the main interest of this particular internship, so I mainly focused on research.
LOCATION
New York City, New York
SECTOR
Publishing, Educational Technology
MY ROLE
Lead Designer
TIMELINE
July-August 2019
Team
Design & Research
Shannon Cates
Business Analyst & Scrum Master
Keerthana Rachamadagu
Developers
Dante Torello
Wei Huan Chen
Samih Sghier
Jordan Tantuico
Hyungsung Song
Mentors
Joyce Pegler
Francesca Bueti
Methods
Scrum Implementation of Agile Development
Research
Discovery Research
Target User Research
Design
Whiteboarding
Wireframing & Visual Design (Sketch)
Development
HTML
CSS
JS
Bootstrap
Responsive web design
PROBLEM STATEMENT
College students who are potential Scholastic Tech Associate recruits do not get a good representation of the Tech Associate program when they land on the associate program page and so are not drawn to apply to a position.
Timeline
DISCOVERY RESEARCH
We started with a table of basic demographic data. From this, I drew a few statistical conclusions to give us a basic idea of our users.
Focus Group
Because our team was fairly representative of the target user, I had each member of the team select one or two competitors that they felt were best-in-class examples of career page websites.
As I was the only designer or research on the team, I tried to encourage them to think in a user-centered way and aid me in brainstorming about our users by listing out things they liked and didn't like about these websites. This served as a sort of focus group.
Then I independently conducted a competitive analysis on the 8 websites.
Competitive Analysis
I knew that we were creating a website from scratch with very little content, so I looked at the 8 websites and determined what features and content were most common among them to give us ideas and guide us in creating our own layout.
I created a matrix to show the distribution of some of the top features. I also did a deep dive into "Call to Action" to see how our competitors encourage users to apply.
When I looked at the content, the following content areas emerged:
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Diversity
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Meet Us
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Locations
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Values/Benefits
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About/Company
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Culture/Life
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Video
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Events
DISCOVERY RESEARCH
Survey
I first created a main user journey based on my cognitive walkthrough of the application process. ​
Then I created a questionnaire and sent it out to the associates.
This gave us 4 additional areas of content to emphasize:
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Culture
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Scholastic Mission
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Benefits
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Tech Environment/Not Too Corporate
Personas
Two personas emerged from the data I had collected. I chose to follow traditional categories for target user personas but added a recruitment category as this was an area where associates varied.
I kept them relatively high-level because it was more useful for our team's purposes.
 Fisher Target User Persona |  Lily Target User Persona |
|---|
WIREFRAMES
DESIGN ITERATION
Sprint 1
We chose the most important elements to begin working on, those which would give value at the end of the project even if we completed nothing else.
I had to design these components in full and then hand them off to the developers.
Sprint 2
We had planned to create additional components in Sprint 2. However, our mentor/client meetings changed this as they requested that we add a video feature and brought up a new problem they wanted us to focus on.
DESIGN CHALLENGES ARISE
Jobs Content Deep Dive
Although we had determined an initial problem statement, during one of our checkpoints, our mentors/clients let us know that they were also looking to address an issue they had with how jobs were displayed on the page.
The Problem
On the current website, jobs were not displayed at all, and we had proposed simply listing teams as most of the competitors did. However, potential recruits apply to many positions and don't following through on the hiring process. Our mentors felt this was because potential hires did not understand the jobs fully and wanted us to include detailed job positions on the main page.
I defined a second problem statement:
​Potential Scholastic Tech Associate recruits apply to several different positions and do not always complete the process.
Research Methods
I was unsure if the clients' proposed solution was the best solution, so I did a deeper competitive analysis on the job content of the 8 websites we had originally studied. I also looked at our target user research to see if any information had come up relating to this issue.
DESIGN SOLUTION
Findings
User research:
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Users tend to apply to any job that they might be qualified for, regardless of which one is best fitting
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For software jobs, users would like to be able to compare them
Competitive Analysis:
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Competitors have created separate job portals, and use filter and search capability to help users apply to the right job
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Competitors only show teams or divisions on their main page
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Those that do show job openings are very minimal
Proposed Solution
Although the most heavily supported solution was to not include job positions on the main page and recommend creating a separate portal, our client did not have the means for such a heavy lift at the time, so I brainstormed solutions with a researcher from a different team.
We landed on some sort of matrix that would allow job comparison. This had the downside of potentially getting long, but our mentors did not anticipate having many job positions listed.
After brainstorming with the mentors and my team, we decided on a job position grid that would have tabs for buckets of like job types.
DESIGN ITERATION
Sprint 3
I added visual elements to the final design and completed the Why Scholastic feature design.
To make sure that a finalized design was done within our time limit and given my restricted allowance for focusing on design as a research intern, I used elements from a previous brochure that the associates supplied to complete the design.
We also went through many iterations during this phase, to accommodate what the developers were able to achieve.
