Watson Career Coach Reimagined
We set out to create a new vision for the product based on user feedback, stakeholder ideas and market insight. Our goal was to align our progress as a cross-discipline, global team. It all started with good ol’ fashioned Design Thinking.
Persona
Employees looking for what’s next or new in their career. Employees need a way to find what’s possible in their company, with a guide showing them how to get there.
My role
Lead Designer, Design Thinking Facilitator, UX and Visual Designer, Design Researcher.
The future experience
Welcome
First time users are welcomed to the experience and given a tour of what’s possible.
Find a job
From a resume upload, employees are directed to the best jobs for their skills and experience. They can filter and share their preferences through the chat.
Understand the details
Employees can easily apply to open jobs in their company, or find ways to grow their skills to become a better match.
Plan what’s next
Employees can work together with Myca to plot out the course to their dream job. They can explore multiple ways taking the traditional approach, or looking at more unexpected possibilities.
Let’s take a look at the process I led the team through…
Listen
Our team has historically been awesome at generating ideas. The struggle has always been capturing ideas and making something tangible, based on real user need. We needed to use Design Thinking to change our sentences from “It would be cool if…” to “Our users need a way to…”. The logical first step was to gather everything we’d heard from our users and work together to find trends. We did this in a Mural activity in order to collaborate remotely with a global team. Each sticky note is a piece of feedback, and each participant had a bundle of notes to summarize for the group. We worked together to find trends to guide our upcoming ideation sessions.
Ideate
Once we were all saturated with real user feedback, we worked together to get our ideas out of our heads and down on (digital) paper. We wrote our ideas out in the form of big idea vignettes. Our session started with a review of our employee personae. From there, we diverged and wrote ideas out for 30 minutes. We spent 30 minutes converging, playing our ideas back, and finding trends between different visions for the future. We grouped similar ideas, rewrote a few, revisited user feedback and got closer and closer to a cohesive whole.
Sketch
I worked to massage the myriad of ideas into a handful of user stories. I took a look at the overall app flow and how we could manipulate things to better serve our image of the future.
Iterate
Once we had a rough structure, a large list of ideas based on real user need and some rough story lines in mind, it was time to iterate. All UX and Visual design work was for the purpose of telling a new story. A new way for employees to learn and grow using Watson Career Coach.
Final direction
After rounds of user testing, stakeholder validation and storytelling, we landed on a final direction that aligned our team on a picture of our product in the future, as well as a revised visual direction to bring our product into a new realm, in line with the latest and greatest IBM Carbon Design System.
