Pearson had a host of unconnected professional training products and services and wanted a unified way to market all of them. In response, I designed a skills assessment system that would point users to training opportunities that matched up with their professional goals.
As a new product, Skills Marketplace called for foundational research. Working within Pearson’s in-house product creation framework, we had 10 weeks to test and validate various aspects of the overall strategy, feasibility, and marketability of the product. If we succeeded, we could expect further funding to continue developing the product.
One of the first questions we needed to explore was whom our audience would be. We did a review of research provided by the business units whose products we’d be promoting, as well as a survey of our own. It left us wondering how our proposed audience viewed skills training as a component of career advancement.
I devised an interview study structured around a timeline of how well the participants felt their skills matched with their job role over the course of their career. Participants were then asked to reflect on how they’d approached skills development as they evolved from role to role.
It emerged that having a good skills fit with your role is an important source of job satisfaction. This together with the information we gleaned about how high performing workers approach career training went on to drive our inquiries in subsequent phases.
Discovery left us with a rich field of How-Might-We’s to answer during this phase. We prioritized based on our evolving understanding of the business case for the product, then moved forward into idea generation.
During some of our sprints, we confined ideation to a single, big How-Might-We, while in others, we combined several.
Here I riffed on the HMW’s about skills assessment, fit with job role, and power user strategies in a storyboard for a mobile onboarding experience.
The user identifies their current job role and completes a skills self-assessment based on that role. They’re then shown a tree view of their possible career paths, with opportunities to explore what skills are needed at each stage. Finally, the user is shown training courses available for the skills they want help with.
For our initial prototypes we focused on the mobile experience for a worker seeking to find and plan training. The onboarding experience needed to avoid complexity while still delivering a useful picture of the user’s skill needs. I started with an assessment, which then gets them to a comparison of their skills with others in the same role.
Would you be comfortable asking your coworkers to rate you on your job skills?
Another prototype focused on this question. Your peers at work are potentially some of the most accurate raters of job skills, but the emotions around reaching out to them for this kind of feedback are fraught. We designed a prototype to make this feedback requesting process as simple and painless as possible.
Although we were paying attention to task completion, during our first few rounds of testing, we were much more focused on whether our presentation reflected users’ mental models when thinking about skills improvement.
Largely, it did. Our work trying to understand how people thought about training during the discovery phase had paid off. We were able to focus on nuances and refine the design in subsequent iterations.
When I signed off the project, Skills Marketplace had been funded by Pearson’s product council to move on to the next phase of new product development.