The brief.

Profile building: minimal, but flexible.

Halberd is creating an all-in-one student services platform for community colleges in order to empower students with knowledge and connect the dots between academic courses and career paths. Recently, they finished building the student-facing course planning functions, and are now tackling the employer side.

Currently, local employers can add their company profiles to their community colleges’ portals, including information such as what the company does, what it’s like to work there, and what opportunities are available for students. However, Halberd is creating the profiles for each employer manually, resulting in a time and manpower bottleneck.

Employers need a way to autonomously build their own profiles so that they can quickly and easily add information about their companies how they want to, when they want to.

Our Solution.

Casey and I researched and prototyped the MVP for an onboarding and profile creation process for employers to quickly and painlessly put their company information onto the student services platform.

This prototype had two main sections: The initial onboarding - the "setup wizard" - and the flexible, cyclical "profile editor".

01. RESEARCH

Understanding Signup and Profiles

Whether you’re making one for yourself, for someone else, or for a company, making a profile can be a time consuming process nobody wants to do more than once. We interviewed users from PR, managerial, and HR backgrounds in order to better understand how they felt about profile creation and onboarding.

Additionally, we examined competitors and leading names in other industries to see how they approached those features, and what we could learn from them moving forward.

02. DESIGN

Creating a Two-in-One Solution

Users wanted precise and informative directions, clearly outlined expectations, and as few required fields as possible. How might we allow the user feel in control from start to finish, while keeping the process straightforward yet flexible, simple yet tailored to the company?

Casey and I conducted several rounds of design studios to finalize the sketches for the onboarding process. We settled on two primary concepts - the initial onboarding process, named the ‘setup wizard’, and the more flexible, cyclical "profile editor'.

The Setup Wizard

The initial onboarding process, which we named the ‘setup wizard’, was only the bare minimum information for a company profile was asked for.

The Profile Editor

After the setup wizard, the user would be directed to the ‘profile editor’, a more centralized, flexible platform in which the user can append additional information of their choice via templates.

03. TESTING

Building and Testing the Greyscale

As we moved from the sketches to the first prototype, Casey handled building the initial layout, while I came up with the copywriting that would populate the forms.

We tested usability with participants from managerial and PR backgrounds, asking them to finish the setup wizard and add two sections to their profile.

Rethinking the Profile Editor

After the usability testing, we realized that we needed to rethink the look and the flow of the profile editor. There were too many words and not enough direction, so we changed the layout of the sidebar and created a homepage rather than a text-heavy welcome.

The results.

Two-in-one, simplicity with flexibility.

At the end of our three week sprint, we had prototyped, tested, and refined the MVP for onboarding employers for Halberd’s Career Communities platform.

By splitting the profile creation into two main concepts, we ensured that the onboarding experience both guided the user and allowed for flexibility and personalization.

LEARNINGS & NEXT STEPS

Takeaways

When it comes to writing, less is more.
- Most users skimmed anything more than two lines. It was both difficult and rewarding to boil down what I wanted to say into two sentences maximum, and being able to achieve the same effect.
Consistent communication is key.
- During our design process, I made sure to consistently keep in touch with both Casey and Halberd. Frequently updating our progress to Halberd meant there were no surprises, and that we always had a clear direction to go in.
- When it came to working with Casey, frequently updating our personal and team progress made for a smooth and productive workflow, which I was really grateful for. I’m proud of our team for working so well together.

Next Steps

We’ve reached the end of the design sprint, but here are some things that we would have liked to address if we had time:

Design for Collaboration
- Some of the feedback we received in our usability testing included the need for multiple editors on a single company profile. What does managing and inviting editors look like?
- With multiple editors could come a need for an accessible history of edits and publishes. What could that look like?
Building Additional Section Forms
- In the Profile Editor, there is a lot more room to allow for greater customization by adding more section types. However, what kind of information are students prioritizing when they are looking through company profiles? More research could be conducted to better understand the student perspective in order to help the employers create more enticing profiles.
Prototyping the Editing Process
- After completing the Setup Wizard, what does it look like for the user to go back and edit that information?
- Where does a user access unfinished sections? How does the Profile Editor let the user know that there are still sections left unfinished?