Revamping the experience of the Rutgers Career Exploration & Success website
Exploring career options can be a daunting task for individuals of any age or background, including students and alumni. It is crucial for educational institutions to provide resources that can aid in career planning.
At Rutgers University, we have a dedicated Career Exploration and Success (CES) department that assists students in connecting their academic experiences with potential career paths. These resources are designed to help individuals identify their strengths, explore various career options, develop skills, and plan for life after graduation.
As part of my Contextual Inquiry course at Rutgers, my team of four designers focused on user research to improve these resources. We utilized various research methods, conducted user testing interviews, and ideated design concepts to enhance the CES department's offerings.
Even though CES is providing a lot of resources, the way it is presented is not user friendly and there is still room for improvement. We found problems with the information architecture, navigation, and overall user experience of the Career Exploration and Success website, which is negatively impacting functional integrity and usability of the website. Users are finding it difficult to navigate through the website and ultimately find the resources they are looking for.
Our focus for contextual inquiry is to comprehend the complete user experience of the career exploration and success website, including any difficulties faced. Our aim is to offer students straightforward and user-friendly career resources that ease the transition from college to career.
To gain insight into our users and empathize with their experiences, we conducted participant interviews as part of our research. Due to the pandemic and its restrictions, we conducted virtual interviews to ensure the safety of all participants. We followed interview protocols, including obtaining consent forms and conducting a pilot test to assess the effectiveness of the process.
We used affinity mapping to identify common themes in user interviews. While creating the diagram, we faced challenges in grouping our findings. We found that breaking it down further would have reduced the number of correlated problems, but each option had its pros and cons. Affinity mapping helped us gather useful positive and negative information from user interviews. Users appreciated the website's overall esthetics, but they disliked being directed to other websites and found the excess of information hard to navigate.
Our team developed user personas that represent typical users of the CES website. By analyzing these personas, we can identify our users' goals, motivations, and pain points, which helps us understand the needs of undergraduates, graduates, and alumni at Rutgers University. This information enables us to create a product that meets the needs of our average users.
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