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Alchemy

Designing a career platform for the next generation.

background

Project Overview

Embarking on a mission to transform the early-career landscape, Alchemy partnered with CCA to harness the power of their product, following their remarkable success in assisting schools with Workday implementation. Together, they set out to create a groundbreaking career community platform, empowering college students to navigate their early professional journeys with confidence.

As solo designer on the team, I spearheaded the end-to-end design process and building Alchemy from the ground up. From conducting in-depth UX research and crafting intuitive prototypes to conducting user tests and establishing a robust foundational design system, every aspect of Alchemy's development was meticulously shaped under my guidance.

The goal

Our ultimate objective was clear: to construct an early-career community platform that not only empowers students but also democratizes access to invaluable opportunities for career growth.

Why is this important?

  • A community could help students access career information.
  • A larger student pool could help recruiters hire easier.
  • School data could help build trust between employers and students.

timeline

Jan – May 2020
5 months

Client

Alchemy

what i did

UX Research
User Test
UX Design
Interaction Design
Design System

team

1 Product Designers
1 Product Managers
2 Engineers

My Process

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user research

Students crave career growth

Students often feel dejected and lost as they go through each step of the job hunting process. They crave career information as there are many unanswered questions and uncertainties.

User journey map based on 8 interviews and 52 online surveys
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user problem

But getting the right career information is hard

Based on our user research, there are 3 significant problems that cause students difficulty accessing career growth information.

Lack of relevant connection            

Difficult to trust                                  

Hard to leverage school resource

Competitive audit

No other platforms solve this for students

Students like to share in context-driven spaces and build authentic connections. But no existing platforms can do this for them. LinkedIn is formal and industry oriented. Student-oriented platforms like Handshake don't have recruiters on them. Social platforms like Facebook are tied to a recruiter's personal profile and feel inappropriate.

We wanted to build a professional platform where students and recruiters could connect

ideation

Cross team collaboration

We ran workshops with our own team and other stakeholders. Here we were looking to brainstorm ideas, gather how others were thinking about career communities, and align on the principles as well.

Wireframes & flows

MVP that focuses on building a people - driven community

Through wireframes and user flows, we could quickly form our platform's skeleton. Partnered closely with PMs and engineers, we prioritized the features of our MVP and created 3 product phases where I would hand off to engineers when each phase was complete so we could parallelize working.

Community, Course Reviews and Messages are the first prioritization since they determine how people engage in Alchemy

Showcase skills straight from courses

I divided the page content into different web sections so I can quickly swap them to test out different layouts and design patterns.

Showcase skills straight from courses

I divided the page content into different web sections so I can quickly swap them to test out different layouts and design patterns.

Design

Professional communities that are built on trust

Alchemy's community focuses on greater depth of engagement with a trustworthy identity system. Getting immediately involved in post details while highlighting comments encourages students to actually read, converse, and benefit from our valuable content.

Better ways to reach out to peers

We frame conversations as a way to follow up from community discussions — not as just a way to get something from a stranger. With our paradigm, messaging is always relevant, always personal, and always welcome.

Peer reviews to help find employable courses

Leveraging Workday's course data, our review system enables students to take full advantage of their school resources. The peer-driven feedback is inclusive to every student; therefore, finding the right courses is no longer a hassle.

Unique profile tailored to different audience

Students want to feel valued for their hard work and education. Our profile page allows them to showcase their skills and talent straight from the courses. A flexible display method makes hiring easy for both students and recruiters.

Not just a mindless job board

Alchemy's job board is a unique split view rather than a monolithic, title-level list. Scanning through our curated jobs, job information and candidate qualification can be quickly obtained with lower friction.

An atomic design system

Alongside a front-end engineering team, I created an atomic design system to make every screen a consistent experience. Every state, variation, and size was captured in a centralized system managed flexibly and adaptably as the platform and its use cases grew.

Impact

50K

student acquisition

2K

Daily active users

Sep 2020

launch

Reflections

design

  • It’s better to try and be wrong than to do nothing at all
  • Parallelizing and creating components sped up execution
  • Make time to do usability testing

communication

  • Aligning at the product feature staged allowed us to move quickly
  • Always prepare solid reasons to articulate my design with the team
  • Some details matter more than others

next

let's make something.

together.

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