CAL POLY CAREER SERVICES
CAL POLY CAREER SERVICES
✳ IN THIS PROJECT I WAS TASKED TO
visualize graduate data to guide students through personalized career paths at Cal Poly
TIMELINE
4 weeks
SOFTWARE
Figma
ROLE
UX Design
User Research
TEAM
Reva Moolky
Sameeha Siraj
Sophia Levin
Kaia Kim
Sri Bala
Nidhi Satish
Career Services at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, provides students with access to resources and guidance for exploring and identifying careers, majors, concentrations, and more.
Career Services conducts an annual survey of the activities of its most recent graduates, which is compiled into the Graduate Status Report (GSR). This includes information on career outcomes related to employment and admissions to graduate or professional schools.
CAL POLY CAREER SERVICES
what is the graduate status report?
TIMELINE
CURRENT DESIGN ??
Career Services came to us to find a way to leverage graduate data analytics to guide students through the job market, offering personalized career paths based on past student data. The website we designed provides insights into average salaries by major and concentration, top industries, professions, and companies relevant to their field of study, becoming an essential resource for students seeking clarity and guidance in their career journey.
Here is the current Graduate Status Report Dashboard:
current user flow
CURRENT DESIGN ??
CLIENT STANDUPS
who is this helping?
By targeting incoming students, current students, and prospective employees, the app seeks to become a vital resource for career exploration and planning. It will empower users with the knowledge and guidance needed to make informed career decisions, based on real data from the university’s graduates. The focus will be on simplicity, relevance, and practical applicability, making the app an essential tool for students navigating their career paths.
During out initial meetings, the client emphasized the importance of:
Website is interactive
Utilizing collected graduate data provided by the client
Feature to aid students in deciding a major — including a filter to view a major that aligns with the student’s interest
Feature to aid students in deciding on a concentration
Feature that allows students to see who are the top employers from Cal Poly. Additionally, the top roles and jobs
Includes description of the roles and jobs
Include the top 10 companies (sourced by graduate data).
QUANTATIVE RESEARCH
what we did
Before diving into the prototype design, we conducted user research to better understand the needs and frustrations of our target audience. After sending out a 10 question survey to students, each team member interviewed 2-3 different people to gather insights on their experiences with the current GSR dashboard.
We sent out a 10 question survey to students at Cal Poly – at the end of the survey, students were allowed to add additional comments
what we gained
Our team wanted to collect more user research in addition to the data the client provided
Highlighted what current students wanted to be featured in the Career Services website
Allowed us to check in with students — would they want access to the grads’ data?
Provided us with qualitative and quantitative data and insights — surveyed current students in a variety of majors
SURVEY RESULTS
students randing for the order of importance of the following factors when exploring potential career paths:
(1 being the most important and 6 being the least important)
Role
Salary
Location
Company
Skill Requirements
Remote/Hybrid
key takeaways
Top Factors in Deciding Career Path and Role
Salary > Personal interest/passion > What they found enjoyable > Location > Company culture/values
Issues with Graduation Status Report
Users reported that the GSR is overwhelming and “too wordy”, believed it could be streamlined better. Students also felt as if the GSR felt very disconnected and confusing for users to understand, for example, there was no reference to what the presented numbers in the data meant.
Addressing Feature Preferences
Users preferred clear, clean, and minimalist design choices. Had a desire for access to a streamlined flow that was company-based, showcasing popular roles within companies for Cal Poly alumni. Users wanted simple and clear statistics and graphics that weren’t overwhelming.
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
To delve deeper into the students' experiences and thought processes, we conducted 14 user interviews with Cal Poly students of different majors and backgrounds. These interviews explored the challenges students face in choosing a career, their considerations in deciding on a major and career path, and their overall feelings towards the career services offered by Cal Poly.
After compiling all the raw data, we organized the insights into an affinity map.The qualitative data revealed that many students consider salary, personal interest, and enjoyment as key factors when deciding on a career. Additionally, participants expressed that the current Graduation Status Report (GSR) dashboard was overly wordy, disconnected, and overwhelming. They expressed a desire for more tailored resources in career planning, specifically geared towards their major, and practical ways to develop the skills needed for their desired roles.
The insights from both the quantitative and qualitative research highlighted a gap between the current career services and the specific needs of students. This feedback will guide the development of our app, ensuring it provides targeted, relevant, and user-friendly resources that help students navigate their career paths more confidently and effectively.
ROLE
role and responsibilities
As a UX Designer for this project, my primary focus was on designing the 'Location' screens, where users can pick a location and receive visualized data of the top jobs and industries in that area.
IDEATION + DESIGN SYSTEM
Through a voting system, and consulting our client, we landed on this design system to ensure that it also stays within the guardrails of Cal Poly’s design system.
We did moodboarding for color and fonts but our client wanted something professional.
LO-FI WIREFRAME
I began crafting my lo-fi screens to brainstorm ways for users to effortlessly search through popular industries roles, and salaries for different locations. Below the search is a list displaying popular US cities for job seekers.
MID-FI WIREFRAME
We discussed the layout of all the screens and we decided that the locations page would only be accessible through the ‘Role‘ and ‘Salary‘ pages instead of having its own filtering system.
final design !
REFLECTION
Special thanks to Cal Poly Iter8
If you made it this far – thanks for reading! Thank you again to my lovely team at Cal Poly Iter8. Here’s what I learned during this project:
One of the main challenges we faced in this project was balancing our vision for the app with the client's preferences. Our team initially wanted to incorporate a variety of fun and gamified elements to make the app engaging and appealing to students. However, our client emphasized the importance of maintaining a professional look and feel, which they believed would better align with the serious nature of career planning and appeal to a broader range of users. This required us to carefully integrate interactive and engaging features while ensuring the overall design remained polished and professional.