Pathfinder
Delivering one source of truth to jobseekers
My Role
I was the second UX designer on Pathfinder' team to help translate user research and identify solutions on the best way to implement a new feature as they prepared for their re-launch. Collaborating with another designer and a researcher, I reviewed previous users insights/behaviors and carried out my design process to help conceptualize a new feature for the platform.
Project Details
Role (8-person team): UX/ UI Designer
Methods: User research, Usability testing, Journey mapping, User stories, Wireframing
Platform: Desktop
Duration: 3 months (January – March 2022)
Overview
Pathfinder is a platform designed to bring transparency to career paths and help jobseekers pursue their passions. Initially well-received, it soon faced challenges with user engagement and retention, revealing a gap between expectations and experience. Our team focused on improving user acquisition and retention for the platform relaunch, while also preparing for the CMU McGinnis Venture Competition.
The Challenge
Pathfinder wants to become a valuable and continued resource to jobseekers interested different industries. They are having trouble acquiring and retaining users, because users weren’t seeing enough value in the platform.
Goal: Design a feature that helps users explore career insights while ensuring discoverability and a seamless experience, reinforcing Pathfinder as a go-to resource for jobseekers.
The Solution
Based on research, we identified that users wanted a platform that would offer a lot more information about an industry or career path beyond required hard skills.
To address this gap, we introduced Stories, a feature that showcases testimonials from professionals, offering firsthand insights into their careers and industries.
Discover Stories
Introduced a discovery page to help job seekers explore diverse stories from industry professionals. The page showcases popular testimonials and serves as a centralized hub for users to easily access relevant insights.
Stories
Users can browse through all stories and filter for industries, experience, company, and more. Once the user has found a story of interest, they can expand each story to see more insight from the selected professional.
Tailored Testimonials
Users can delve into each professional’s story to learn about their journey, daily responsibilities, and additional insights. They can also easily access recommended stories, allowing them to continue exploring relevant content seamlessly.
Research
Who are our users?
User stories were invaluable in defining user needs, helping us understand their motivations, challenges, and goals to shape our design approach. Insights from our UX researcher’s previous findings and narratives offered a deeper understanding of Pathfinder’s target audience, guiding the design process.
Understanding Pathfinder’s Current Offerings
I evaluated the website's core features and value propositions in order to get a better understanding of how it was serving its users.
My Observations
By the end of each journey users can find a lot data and statistics on educational background and skills.
There’s a lack of detail on day-to-day experiences, soft skills, etc. and how to enter an actual industry/field.
What are our users’ biggest challenges?
Previous surveys and interviews revealed that people often had to scour multiple platforms (Reddit, Blind, Level.fyi, Linkedin, etc.) in order to narrow down applicable information to their particular career paths.
“It’s sometimes difficult to find blogs/posts where people talk about their personal experiences.”
“Too much information is scattered across multiple websites/platforms suggesting different things.”
What are users’ current solutions to find more information about their desired career paths?
Surveys and interviews showed users often relied on platforms like Reddit, Blind, and Medium for job search insights. After exploring these sites myself, I observed that these sites offer professionals valuable, career-specific content through active communities
Key Insights
Competitors have successfully built strong communities where users are given the freedom to educate and learn from others
Successful platforms give users content they can relate to and give them a sense of belonging
User-driven communities create trust
Mapping the current user flow
By analyzing the user flow alongside user feedback, we identified the phase where users experienced the highest levels of dissatisfaction. It became evident that Phase 3 of the journey was the most problematic, highlighting a clear opportunity for improvement. Many users expressed frustration with the career page results, citing a lack of in-depth insights as a key reason for leaving the site.
Define
Defining User Patterns
I mapped the current user experience to visualize each phase of the journey, helping identify pain points and areas of frustration. This helped me pinpoint which area where users were experiencing the most frustration and highlighted opportunities for improvement.
Users value community
The ability to learn from and relate to others creates trust. We see this exemplified in forum sites (Reddit, Blind , Medium) that users are currently turning to to learn more about their prospective fields. Based on user research, there is a need to relate to other professionals with varying backgrounds and insights to answer jobseekers’ questions about entering a specific field.
Users are curious
While providing data on necessary skills for specific roles/industries is helpful, jobseekers want more context on how skills can be applied through learning from and relating to others’ journeys. Usability tests and interviews revealed users were walking away from Pathfinder without the rich insights they expected
Feature Prioritization
Our synthesized research and user stories revealed that users deeply valued hearing from other professionals. With guidance from my product manager, we introduced a new feature to highlight user-generated testimonials. We built a foundational framework for the experience and promoted the concept across multiple channels, including Reddit, IndieHackers, and our personal networks.
Key Insights
Out of 207 people that checked out the concept, over 50% of users expressed interest in the new feature and subscribed for the next launch of Pathfinder’s platform. This helped to inform and validate our design approach.
First Draft Wireframes
With enough research gathered, we moved forward with the following priorities in mind:
Introducing a new feature and prioritizing its discoverability
Information hierarchy to present users’ testimonials and dense information in an approachable way
Final Design Decisions
Based on our usability test results from the first prototype, we were able to apply several changes that ensured better accessibility and visual hierarchy to encourage users to explore this new feature.
Discover
Clear call-to-actions ("Discover Stories") encourage user engagement and set expectations, serving as an introductory guide for first-time testimonial explorers.
All Stories
Users can browse all stories and use filters to refine their search. Summarized story cards enable quick scanning for relatable testimonials.
Expanded Story
Users can expand story cards for in-depth testimonials, each answering five key jobseeker questions. Related testimonials are suggested at the bottom of the card to encourage continued exploration.
User testing to verify we met user needs
We conducted usability tests with 9 users in order to confirm our proof of concept. Each participant was asked to complete 3 tasks and complete a short survey after.
Results
All users completed tasks successfully and loved the concept, but some experienced frustration within our first prototype. Users found:
Some filtering options’ language was confusing - “difference between career and industry?”
Appreciated the related testimonials recommendation
Felt the collapsed and expanded abilities of the cards made the stories easy to parse through
Given all of this feedback, we plan to adjust our approach in visual and UX design in order to create a better experience. For the next iteration, we would do some more user research to figure out the appropriate filter language.
Outcomes
Presented idea to stakeholders in the Carnegie Mellon University McGinnis Venture Competition as finalist
Launched newest feature on Pathfinder’s website and notified subscribers via newsletter
Reflections
Challenges
We had to carefully manage the timeline since most of the team had full-time jobs, and we were preparing to enter the Pathfinder track in a venture competition.
Shortly after I joined the team, our UX researcher transitioned to other projects, so I took the time to thoroughly review the research and extract key insights to gain a clear understanding of the project's progress.
Achievements
Collaborating with a team primarily composed of engineers was an invaluable learning experience. Their expertise allowed us to assess feasibility and identify potential limitations early in the brainstorming process, which helped shape a more informed and strategic design approach.
Preparing for the McGinnis Venture Competition pitch allowed insights into the business side of the product, including future monetization strategies, key factors investors look for in a product or business, and the potential of our idea.
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