Career Fair experiences are marred by long queues where students spend most of their times standing in long queues and getting exhausted, often disappointed by the total number of right people they are able to speak to.
Our initial findings led us to this conclusion:
Imbalanced load + Long wait times + Anxiety + Uncertain Outcome = Unfavourable Experience.
As we set our minds to redesign the career fair, my team and I came up with this value proposition:
We believe in delivering value through efficiency and sharing of knowledge. By employing techniques of efficient crowd management, we will optimize the use of time for students, maximize networking time, and improve engagement for all students.
The 6 weeks of working on this project was one roller coaster ride. I was initially excited about this course and especially this project. However, I had no idea that this experience design project would be an experience to remember. I have invested way more time than I had expected or anticipated in this project, but every minute spent on it was well worth it. Thinking beyond user experience and product design was a key learning that we learned by working on a service design project that involved designing the entire service ecology.
TLDR? Just watch this video:
Our Process
Our process could be broken down into multiple phases ranging from discovery, user research, building personas, ideation, building of lean canvas and customer journey maps, prototyping, and usability studies.
The Discovery Phase
We went out observing problems around us and identified there were immense opportunities in terms of improving value delivery in career fairs.
We did not choose any specific aspect of the career fair at this stage.
User Research Phase
We went on a field trip, invited multiple students for interviews.
Interviewed 7 students from the UW MSIM program.
Documented the interviews on video, for repeat analysis.
Built affinity maps to look for themes and patterns.
A common theme that emerged was the inefficient expenditure of time.
Other themes that emerged were: Lack of relevant recruiter information, unavailability of refreshments, absence of information about open positions, exhaustion etc.
User Persona
The Ideation Phase
From 20+ ideas, we narrowed down to just 3 ideas -
"Flagpoles",
"Effectively Communicating Wait times",
"Making Information about recruiters accessible to all"
Lean Canvas
Our lean canvas puts together a larger picture that includes both the usability and business aspects of our project.
Customer Journey Mapping
For our customer journey mapping, we choose to focus on our primary persona Arshi and mapped her journey as to how she would experience our new design. This is also reflected in the solution section of our final video.
The Prototyping Phase
We decided to design multiple experience prototypes: a cardboard model to highlight the problems, an environment mock up to have real people test our design, and a mobile app prototype to augment the experience.
Experience Prototype of the Environment
Our experience prototype included mock ups of:
Flagpoles for easy spotting
RFID scanner and display to effectively communicate with students
Big displays showing average weight times for all the queues
The Psychology of Waiting in Lines
What matters most in a queue is how people feel about it rather than waiting itself.
Occupied time feels shorter than unoccupied time.
The activity provided to engage should benefit in itself or be related to the service encounter.
Uncertain waits are longer than certain waits and induce anxiety.
Providing valuable engagement in the queue can reduce anxiety, reduce perception of time and influence memory of experience positively.
This is the inspiration behind the next part of our prototyping phase: the Mobile app.
Prototyping the Mobile App
The Mobile app was introduced not as a facilitator of the experience but as a tool to enhance the experience. There were enough elements (such as the RFID scanners and big screens) that would alone be enough to facilitate the experience. However, the mobile app was built to augment the experience by keeping users busy while they stood in lines (however short they may be) and providing them crucial information that would interest them to use the app and prepare them mentally as well.
Evaluation & Implications
We went through a round of moderated usability tests where we asked few of our users who we had originally interviewed to come and experience the prototype of the new career fair.
Our findings from our usability study consists of these key points:
Limitation on the number of concurrent check ins
Missing out on an appointment
Tap-out to confirm completion of appointment
Predictive queue management
The implications of these suggestions were as follows and we decided to include these suggestions in our next round of prototyping:
Time-based limit to avoid overlap or concurrent check ins
Deletion from the queue if someone misses out an appointment
Making the RFID machine capable to register tap-outs to confirm completion of appointment
Addition of sensors to collect queue utilization data to help generate a predictive queue management model
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