Script writing / usability testing / remote & in-lab sessions / data synthesis
Observing a usability test and taking Trello notes with team members
Usability testing for SkillSense revealed opportunities to connect early career practitioners with mentors and experienced professionals.
Launching a career in a new industry presents many challenges, including making meaningful connections with more established professionals and finding project work to keep advancing your skills. SkillSense is a networking and freelancing platform that addresses both of these problem spaces. SkillSense is driven by the ability to connect early-career individuals (e.g., students, recent grads, career switchers) with those more established in the industry who are looking to serve as mentors. These less-experienced, but connected professionals are able to leverage the platform to find project work from clients with tight budgets (e.g., startups, nonprofits) and/or small project scopes (e.g., MVP prototypes). When engaging on a project, they benefit from the guidance of a mentor, visible to the client. Clients benefit from a competitive rate and the supervised nature of the engagement. As SkillSense prepares for launch, they are especially looking to ensure that clients are aware of the value of hiring ‘mentored’ or supervised talent. Clients should be aware that the early-career professionals they are hiring have the support of a more established career professional, in order to increase their confidence in the work product as well as the platform as a whole.
Users
Clients looking to hire freelancers to complete small-scale projects
Early-career individuals looking to acquire project work and advance their skills
Established professionals wanting to give back to their communities
Site Goals
Facilitate networking between early-career individuals and established professionals
Easily connect those looking for work with those wanting to take on a new project
Test Goal
Evaluate how well site connects students with mentors and clients, and communicates credibility of users. Identify users pain points surrounding usability. Identify opportunities to strengthen communication of sites value.
Evaluation
Heuristic Analysis
After settling into our understanding of the user goals, my design team and I used the Nielsen Norman Group’s 10 Heuristics for User Interface Design using a severity scale of 1-3. Each team member took on a different user role. Mine was the student role where I tested these tasks:
Create/edit a profile
Search for a mentor
Request a mentor
Send/view messages to mentor
Search for jobs
Apply for a job
Invite mentor to a job
Heuristic analysis results
My teams white board with our weekly scope
After running heuristics, we came up with our testing goals.
Identify user pain points surrounding ease of use
How well does Skill Sense communicate credibility of site and users?
“I see the intention and its intriguing”
Research
Usability tests:
In-lab and remote usability testing were conducted to get directly to the trouble points of Skill Sense’s website. I learned so much during my first usability test. My design team and I constructed an evaluation script with one to three scenarios to walk through per role. Framing scenarios in a way that doesn’t lead the user in any specific direction was a difficult task. Further, asking those questions to the users and watching them become frustrated or upset over functions not being available is hard to watch and even harder not to intervene and help correct or lead them.
Observing usability test behind a one way window, monitoring the users screen through an HDMI output.
Remote testing:
Capturing feelings and emotions through digital platforms is a difficult task. Remote testing samples were gathered from personal connections. In remote sessions I had three users who fit the roles of actual users of SkillSense, a client user who owns an IT company, a practitioner in the tech space who has mentored in the past, and a user who is a recent graduate with a degree in computer science looking for work.
Google Hangouts and Quicktime screen recordings along with consent forms created a uniform ecosystem of platforms to conduct remote testing. How i recruited? what i learned (challenge, different next time)
Google Hangouts logo
Quicktime logo
In-lab:
In-lab testing was conducted at Fathom Consulting in Downtown, Minneapolis. Our findings were able to help Skill Sense grow and see new insights by getting direct feedback from our users. In lab had similar intentions as the remote, but being able to see the emotion in users was invaluable. Per user evaluation there was a note taker in the evaluation room with the moderator and user. Behind the one way window there were observers following the actions from the user by watching a mirrored screen display and taking live notes on our Trello board.
A communal Trello board for the design team used to document notes live during usability evaluations. Labeled by themes created before the evaluations
Findings
Key findings/ usability pain points(include images)
Users showed confusion after logging in and landing on their profile page. Many comments suggested to have seen a home feed of sorts rather than your profile dashboard and felt confused after login.
Screenshot of a mentor’s profile
