Pitch: Reimagining Professional Connections

My Role: UX Designer| Duration: 3 Weeks | Project Status: Completed

Project Overview: Development of a professional networking application that blends personal life and work life specifically focusing on onboarding and profile creation.

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What is Pitch? Pitch is the networking tool that helps people make authentic professional connections rooted in the belief that people are more than just words on a page. Pitch aims to learn who the user is beyond their resume to help form meaningful connections and bridge the gap between their personal and professional lives.

Problem Space: As workforce recruitment and connection grow increasingly remote, establishing new professional relationships becomes more difficult.Young generations place extreme value upon workplace culture. Currently, people are working too hard to become the “perfect candidate”, and struggle to find a place where they can bring their full self to work.

Our Goal: Pitch is reimagining professional connections by creating a solution for people who want to build authentic relationships through shared morals, values, interests, and goals. WIth a unique onboarding flow, Pitch will allows users to create custom profiles that share their personal and professional stories in tandem. Our team provided Pitch with a clickable prototype MVP (minimal viable product), which prioritizes unique on-boarding and profile creation experiences.

Opportunity: Findings from our research will support a user-centric design, and allow users to move through Pitch’s MVP prototype to test onboarding and profile-creation screens. This will allow us as designers to ensure that we are continuing to develop and enhance the user experience.

My Team: Cat Chau, Jordie Oetken, Oendrila Das

Methodology

Discover + Define

Understanding our problem space

Screener survey for interviews, User Interviews, Affinity Mapping, Persona, Journey Map, Problem Statement

Business Research

Competitive Brand Matrix, Competitive Feature Analysis

Design

Design studio, Hi-fidelity wireframes, Usability testing

Tools Used:

Figma, Zoom, Slack, Otter, Zeplin, Keynote

Process

INSERT IMAGE OF PROCESS DESIGN

RESEARCH PHASE — Exploring The Space

After meeting with our client to get a better understanding of what they want to accomplish with Pitch, our team decided to dive into research. Since Pitch is a start up with no existing platform, our team wanted to conduct research on a target audience focusing primarily on networking platforms.

Prior to conducting our user interviews, we built a competitive brand matrix to ensure that we create a truly unique product. By researching brands in our industry space, we establish their products’ specializations, identify the target audience, and formulate our opportunity space.

Key Takeaways

• Competitors largely fall within the job-seeking and networking space, which include limited reviews and little insight into the day to day activities within a firm. There is also a lack of focus on meaningful networking.
• Other competition includes social media platforms that allow users to share more about their personality/ hobbies/ interests

User interviews: We conducted user interviews with 7 individuals who have all utilized a networking platform throughout their professional careers. We developed a discussion guide which allowed our team to think through the most pertinent questions that could lead to insights around our problem space. Our discussion guide consisted of questions around habits using a networking platform along with a set of questions focusing on getting a job.

Once our interviews were complete, we synthesized our data by filling out summary tables for each participant, which allowed us to pull key observations, quotes, behaviors, likes/dislikes, and their process with using platforms and getting a job.

Some notable quotes that really struck out to my team and I were:

“I think sometimes it gets lost in translation that you’re a real human and not a working robot.”

“You can put your interests on your resume… but I want an employer to see my sociable side, my interpersonal skills.”

“I want to be authentic to my employer”

Affinity Mapping: In order to extract key learnings from our user research, our team created an affinity map. This method allowed us as researchers to group similar observations extracted from interviews and to see emerging patterns and common themes in our qualitative research that will be used to drive the design of our solution.

Persona — This is Jasmine Butter

Based off the user interview data that we synthesized Jasmine Butter was born. Jasmine is a representation of Pitch’s target audience who encompasses the insights that we gathered from research.

INSERT JASMINES PERSONA IMAGE HERE

Key Takeaways

• To Network and find people with similar interest in the field she is entering
• Ability to highlight her soft skills and personality
• To get a full overview of the work culture and people within the industry
• She doesn’t like not knowing what it’s like to work at a particular company
• Believes that her resume represents her professionally, but not personally

Journey Map

In order to understand and visually communicate Jasmines needs and pain points let’s take a look at Jasmine’s users journey of networking and finding a job within the real estate industry through the Linkedin mobile app.

INSERT JASMINES JOURNEY MAP

Key Takeaways

• Jasmine wants to personalize her resume and highlight soft-skills
• Jasmine wants to expand her network after moving into a different industry
• Jasmine needs filters to refine her search
• Jasmine wants to view the profiles of current employees to know begin establishing connections
• Jasmine wants an understanding of the work culture, company size, and day to day activities within potential company
• Jasmine wants to directly communicate with individuals in order to broaden network

Problem Statement

After conducting and finalizing our research… So we set out to find the right solution, keeping the Target user in mind.

Making professional connections and finding the right job is getting harder as the workforce becomes more digital and remote. The next generation places extreme value on workplace culture. Currently, people are working too hard to become the “perfect candidate”, instead of finding a place where they can bring their full self to work.

While transitioning through jobs, Jasmine is struggling to find a networking platform that gives her insight on potential workplaces. In her last job, the job description didn’t clearly state her employer’s expectations and she is nervous that it might happen again.

How might we provide Jasmine with a networking tool that helps cultivate authentic professional connections in which people can blend personal and professional stories?

RESEARCH INTO DESIGN PHASE

Competitive Analysis — Feature Analysis

In order to get into the design phase, let’s connect back to our competitive matrix. Our team created a feature analysis which looked at direct competitors operating in the same space as Pitch. In doing this we were able to define the space in terms of understanding the landscape avoiding “me toos” and finding ways to differentiate.

Key Takeaways:

• Though many applications within the networking sphere employ similar features, key areas of opportunity are clear, primarily through demonstrating user’s knowledge, credibility, and capabilities, as well as providing skill endorsements, personalized resumes, and comments.

MoSCoW Map

Our team created a MoSCoW Map in order to evaluate potential features within the Pitch mobile application. From this foundation, we prioritized features based upon research and client need, and sorted each into the respective categories. Sorting features in a visual capacity allows us to determine what to design first, and what to design later in the process.

Key Takeaways

• The focus should be directed towards showcasing an individual’s interests and hobbies, as well as their personal and professional achievements
• Highlighting soft skills and presenting a Pitch video are a key priority
• Showcasing both a user’s personality and their work experience are important for establishing a meaningful networking space

DESIGN PHASE

Taking what we learned through the Feature Prioritization Grid and MoSCoW Map, our team conducted a Design Studio to iterate on possible design solutions for our product. Through alternating rounds of individual sketching and critiquing we were able to focus our thoughts around the design.

As a result of the Design Studio process, we focused our design on several key elements:

• Sign up/Login Process
• Unique Onboarding Experience
• Building a Pitch Profile for user
• Complete Profile

Post design studio we hit the ground running to create our first iteration of hi-fidelity wireframes focusing on the unique onboarding experience, the creation of a profile, and the viewing of a completed profile.

Connecting back to our research and based off our client expectations the team decided that these three areas would be best to focus on and once the prototype was built we could begin usability testing.

Usability Testing

In order to validate that our features are usable, the team and I created a high fidelity prototype. We conducted two rounds of usability; one with our first high-fidelity iteration and then taking the data we collected from that test and implemented the changes into our next high fidelity iteration.

Both rounds consisted of five participants each, and participants were also professionals who fit into our criteria of using a professional networking platform. Participants were asked to complete three different tasks.

Based off the task score card above, our first round of usability testing was very mixed. We saw direct paths, indirect paths, and direct failures. The time on task as well as the rating also varied per user. In reference to the hiccups for task one, our users didn’t know that in order to navigate to the next questions you had to swipe. In terms of the third task the term “timeline” was misleading and users didn’t expect to find Jasmine’s work history within that section. Based off recommendations from our users we implemented those design changes into our next iteration.

As you can see our team decided to make changes based off our usability testing from round one to make sure our user experience for Pitch is as functional as possible.

Our team then conducted another round of usability testing with five new participants asking them the same tasks but implementing the feedback we received from round one.

Based off the task score card above, our second round of usability testing had a much higher success rate than the first round. We saw majority direct paths with a couple indirect paths, but no direct failures. One thing to note is that the time on task also decreased significantly based off the deltas. This gave us confidence that our users were able to successfully flow through our tasks in a very timely fashion.

For task one, our users knew where they would have to go to find the other questions. Adding the darker overlay and the arrows prompted to swipe. For our the third task the term “Experience” was much more digestable in a sense that users knew that this is where they would find Jasmines work experience and could locate her position at Microsoft.

Final Thoughts and Next Steps

We learned that our users understood the app’s purpose in bridging their personal and professional lives. Users felt secure with the verifications and privacy checks provided by the onboarding screens. In addition, users enjoyed customizing their own profile through browsing questions, showcasing their soft skills, and choosing to highlight various profile features.

Next Steps:

We recommend the following:

• Continue to iterate on the design, taking user feedback into consideration
• Run a another round of usability testing with additional users
• Build out sections of prototype that were not yet “clickable”, such as: Featured Highlights, uploading a video and profile picture, inviting friends to join platform, messaging function
• Conceptualize home screen design, including stories function, and hold a design studio to visualize ideas.
• Implement prompts to encourage users to continue regularly posting and uploading content on the platform, including building out a “question of the day”, sent as a notification or story-prompt.
• Regularly send recommendations/suggestions based upon mutual friends across other platforms, and/or similar interest/hobbies etc.