Website Redesign: Parker Dewey

Project Information

Team: Kamran Khan, Jaisah Jaylo, Wendy Klarman, and Kate Lackie

Design Practices: User research and synthesis, paper prototyping, wireframing, digital prototyping

Timeframe: 3 week sprint

Tools: Sketch, inVision, Miro, Gloomaps, Marvel, paper and pen

Role

• User Research and synthesis

• Paper prototyping and ideation

• Wireframe prototyping and ideation

• Digital prototype tests
  
  

Major Learning

• How to address client expectations and to provide a product solution that is based solidly in user research yet addresses the client's concern for scalable future growth.

• Clients know their products extremely well but may not have accurate ideas of how users interact with and understand their product. This can cause a disconnect for the clients when they are trying to identify ways to improve their business.

The Problem Statement

As a decision maker involved in staffing, the user needs to feel confident in the external resources they use to find talent to complete projects and meet organizational goals.

Our Solution

We believe that by providing examples of Micro-Internships in action and research-driven navigation and content solutions, the user will be able to confidently plan for company resource needs and find diverse talent to enhance the company’s culture and efficacy.

Competitive Analysis

Our team decided to start with a competitive analysis to see what other companies that functioned in a similar space had to offer.

10 competitors were analyzed such as Handshake, Fiverr, and Freelancer

We identified the following trends:

• Images of real people are prevalent 

  • Adds relatability and a sense of connection

• Pricing information is not readily available

  • Adds an advantage to be transparent and provides trust for users

• Multiple websites have specific examples of success

  • Adds credibility when you use case studies, when people see something that’s worked, they’ll be more likely to believe it can work again/for them!

Contextual Inquiry

Opportunities

• Users were confused by terminology

  • There was terminology that was new and unclear to users such as describing job seekers as “career launchers”. This was interpreted as both business and potential Micro-Interns by users.
    Using clear yet descriptive language would help users to understand what Parker Dewey was offering.

• Users were uncertain how Parker Dewey is unique

• The explanation of Parker Dewey’s value proposition and the description of what a Micro-Internship entailed was spread out over several different pages and involved reading a lot of text.
  
  By immediately defining a Micro-Internships scope and providing a real world example, we would allow users to understand the value of Parker Dewey right away.

User Interviews

• 12 interviews were conducted  

• Participants were both company representatives and students or recent grads

• Questions focused on values, use of third party vendors and internship engagement

Questions that prompted a strong user response:

• How does your company get things done when you don’t have available resources (time, people, tools)?

• How are [company] values incorporated into the running of the business and how you manage people? 

• Illustrated the way that an organization’s values affect long term organizational goals

  • Illuminating the inclusive nature of Micro-Internships would keep the value add of Parker Dewey top of mind for users

• When companies are under-resourced, projects tend to fall to the wayside if not immediately prioritized by senior leadership

  • Micro-Internships could fill the resource gaps companies suffer from allowing them to complete projects that were placed on the back burner

• Demonstrates the willingness of users to engage in paid micro-internship programs

  • Supports the viability of Parker Dewey’s payment strategies

Main Takeaways

• Companies value diverse, dynamic culture

  • Interns raise morale and energize the office

• Resource constraints get in the way

  • Band-aid solutions don’t solve long-term problems

• Trade offs may not be worth the risk

  • Decision makers are risk averse to new potential solutions

Personas

Our persona represents the key characteristics of what the user data suggested was our primary user. Keeping these personas top of mind informed our design process and helped us keep the users pain points in the forefront of our design solution.

The Design Workshop Process

Low Fidelity to High Fidelity Iterative Process Overview

Design Goals

• Explaining Micro-Internships at the top of the landing page

• Included real-life example infographic to increase value transparency

• Raised prominence of user testimonials to address cultural value-add to business

• Attempted to increase understanding of the inclusive nature of Micro-Internships

Low to Mid Fidelity Annotated Changes

Mid to High Fidelity Annotated Changes

The Prototype

Prototype Testing

• Multiple rounds of usability testing were performed

  • Users expressed confusion regarding the prominence of the call to action buttons.

    • Our team color coded the call to action buttons in green and the resource buttons in blue in order to prevent the disruption of the user flow.

  • Users were not always sure that the information they were reading was relevant to them.

    • We edited the copy and the placement of clarifying text to clearly illustrate if the content was referring to business or job seeker information.

• We also added images of real people and raised the overall fidelity to encourage trust and transparency.

The Future

Parker Dewey expressed to us that they were interested in growing their business through the creation of Micro-Internship packages. As the structure of these packages was not yet finalized by Parker Dewey we did not address the package creation in our MVP. We did create a mockup of a way to introduce users to the concept of creating Micro-Internship packages for future conceptualization.