Pathfinder

Delivering one source of truth to jobseekers

My Role

I was the second UX designer brought on to the Pathfinder team to help translate user research and identify solutions on the best way to implement a new feature as they prepared for their re-launch. Collaborating with another designer and a researcher, I reviewed previous users insights/behaviors and carried out my design process to help conceptualize a new feature for the platform.

Overview

Pathfinder is a platform that aims to provide more transparency to career paths and inspire people to pursue the right passions. Recognizing a gap in job-seeking education and resources, they developed a tool designed to guide job seekers on how to successfully enter a specific field.

When Pathfinder first launched, the concept and platform received positive feedback, indicating a clear need for their solution. However, low engagement and retention revealed a disconnect between user expectations and the platform’s performance. This prompted the team to identify opportunities for improvement. The primary goal of this project was to determine how to attract new users and boost retention rates.

In addition, our team was preparing to enter Pathfinder in the Carnegie Mellon University McGinnis Venture Competition, a competition for hundreds of entrepreneurial teams competing to secure a $60K investment in their idea. While we did not win the competition, we received valuable feedback and insight for the next sprint to continue improving Pathfinder.

Project Details

Role (8-person team): UX/ UI Designer

Methods: User research, Usability testing, Journey mapping, User stories, Wireframing

Platform: Desktop

Duration: 3 months (January – March 2022)

The Challenge

“I love the concept of Pathfinder but would like to gain more insight on the industry. I’m interested in to see the value in the resource.”

Pathfinder wants to become a valuable and continued resource to jobseekers interested different industries. They are having trouble acquiring and retaining users, because users weren’t seeing enough value in the platform.

Goal: Design a feature that helps users explore career insights while ensuring discoverability and a seamless experience, reinforcing Pathfinder as a go-to resource for jobseekers.

Discover Stories

Introduced a discovery page to help job seekers explore diverse stories from industry professionals. The page showcases popular testimonials and serves as a centralized hub for users to easily access relevant insights.

Stories

Users can browse through all stories and filter for industries, experience, company, and more. Once the user has found a story of interest, they can expand each story to see more insight from the selected professional.

Based on research, we identified that users wanted a platform that would offer a lot more information about an industry or career path beyond required hard skills.

To address this issue, we introduced 'Stories,' a new feature that enables users to explore testimonials from professionals sharing their experiences and backgrounds, providing deeper insights into relevant industries and careers.

Tailored Testimonials

Users can delve into each professional’s story to learn about their journey, daily responsibilities, and additional insights. They can also easily access recommended stories, allowing them to continue exploring relevant content seamlessly.

The Solution

Research and Discovery

My Observations

By the end of each journey users can find a lot data and statistics on educational background and skills.
There’s a lack of detail on day-to-day experiences, soft skills, etc. and how to enter an actual industry/field.

Specific career page

Understanding Pathfinder’s Current Offerings

Since I was brought on to the team later, I wanted to better understand how Pathfinder positions themselves as a jobseeking tool. I evaluated its core features and value propositions in order to get a better understanding of how it was serving its users.

Homepage

User Story 1:

Career Transitioners

When I am looking for or transitioning into a career

I want to learn about career paths relevant to my personal strengths in skills

So that I form interest in a specific area of the tech industry

User Story 2:

New Graduates entering the Workforce

When I am actively pursuing a specific career or role

I want to learn about the process of entering a career and identify what employers are looking for

So that I can feel confident in entering an industry to develop my career

Who are our users?

User stories were invaluable in defining user needs—helping us understand their motivations, challenges, and goals to shape our design approach. Insights from our UX researcher’s previous findings and stories provided a deeper understanding of Pathfinder’s target audience to guide the design process.

Key Insights

As our target audience is looking to start a career in a specific field, the main problem is:

“Too much information is scattered across multiple websites/platforms suggesting different things.”

“It’s sometimes difficult to find blogs/posts where people talk about their personal experiences.”

As our target audience is looking to start a career in a specific field, they feel current solutions are:

What are our users’ biggest challenges?

Previous surveys and interviews revealed that people often had to scour multiple platforms (Reddit, Blind, Level.fyi, Linkedin, etc.) in order to narrow down applicable information to their particular career paths.

What are users’ current solutions to find more information about their desired career paths?

Key Insights:

Competitors have successfully built strong communities where users are given the freedom to educate and learn from others
Successful platforms give users content they can relate to and give them a sense of belonging
User-driven communities create trust

We learned from surveys and interviews that they often turned to competitors like Reddit, Blind, and Medium to find valuable information for their job searches. After exploring these sites myself, I observed that these platforms give many professionals the opportunity to share and explore valuable career insights. In addition, the platforms make it easy to find content in communities that directly relate to their desired career path or current job search.

Pinpointing the area of opportunity

By analyzing the user flow alongside user feedback, we identified the phase where users experienced the highest levels of dissatisfaction. It became evident that Phase 3 of the journey was the most problematic, highlighting a clear opportunity for improvement. Many users expressed frustration with the career page results, citing a lack of in-depth insights as a key reason for leaving the site.

Mapping the current user flow

I mapped the current user experience to visualize each phase of the journey, helping identify pain points and areas of frustration. This helped me pinpoint which area where users were experiencing the most frustration and highlighted opportunities for improvement.

Define

Defining User Patterns

Users value community

The ability to learn from and relate to others creates trust. We see this exemplified in forum sites (Reddit, Blind , Medium) that users are currently turning to to learn more about their prospective fields. Based on user research, there is a need to relate to other professionals with varying backgrounds and insights to answer jobseekers’ questions about entering a specific field.

Users are curious

While providing data on necessary skills for specific roles/industries is helpful, users want more context on how skills can be applied through learning from and relating to others’ journeys. By performing usability tests, we found that jobseekers were walking away from Pathfinder without the rich insights they expected.

Feature Prioritization: What’s missing from Pathfinder?

Through our synthesized research and user stories, it became evident that users highly valued the experiences of other professionals. Guided by my product manager, we decided to introduce a new feature to the platform. We developed a basic framework for showcasing user-generated testimonials and promoted the concept across multiple channels, including Reddit, IndieHackers, and our personal networks

Key Insights

Out of 207 people that checked out the concept, over 50% of users expressed interest in the new feature and subscribed for the next launch of Pathfinder’s platform. This helped to inform and validate our design approach.

Design

Designing and Implementing the new feature

First Draft Wireframes

With enough research gathered, we moved forward with the following priorities in mind:

Introducing a new feature and prioritizing its discoverability
Information hierarchy to present users’ testimonials and dense information in an approachable way

Design Decisions

Based on our usability test results from the first prototype, we were able to apply several changes that ensured better accessibility and visual hierarchy to encourage users to explore this new feature.

Discover

Clear call-to-actions ("Discover Stories") encourage user engagement and set expectations, serving as an introductory guide for first-time testimonial explorers.

All Stories

Users can browse all stories and use filters to refine their search. Summarized story cards enable quick scanning for relatable testimonials.

Expanded Story

Users can expand story cards for in-depth testimonials, each answering five key jobseeker questions. Related testimonials are suggested at the bottom of the card to encourage continued exploration.

Final Designs

Evaluate

Usability testing to verify we met users needs

Design Process Research Define Design Deliver

Results

All users completed tasks successfully and loved the concept, but some experienced frustration within our first prototype. Users found:

Some filtering options’ language was confusing - “difference between career and industry?”
Appreciated the related testimonials recommendation
Felt the collapsed and expanded abilities of the cards made the stories easy to parse through

Given all of this feedback, we plan to adjust our approach in visual and UX design in order to create a better experience. For the next iteration, we would do some more user research to figure out the appropriate filter language.

User Testing

We conducted usability tests with 9 users in order to confirm our proof of concept. Each participant was asked to complete 3 tasks and complete a short survey after.

Each test asked users to complete 3 primary tasks. We asked users to:

Access the feature that allows you to see stories from engineers.
Filter to find: people who work at Nvidia AND who work full-time AND who works as a software engineer.
Find a testimonial from a software engineer who worked at Nvidia and read out loud what their day-to-day life looks like.

Further user testing and user research to refine testimonial page offerings
Additional design phases to encourage interaction between professionals and jobseekers (comment, up/down vote system, bookmarking, etc.)

Reflections

Challenges

We had to carefully manage the timeline since most of the team had full-time jobs, and we were preparing to enter the Pathfinder track in a venture competition.
Shortly after I joined the team, our UX researcher transitioned to other projects, so I took the time to thoroughly review the research and extract key insights to gain a clear understanding of the project's progress.

Achievements

Collaborating with a team primarily composed of engineers was an invaluable learning experience. Their expertise allowed us to assess feasibility and identify potential limitations early in the brainstorming process, which helped shape a more informed and strategic design approach.
Preparing for the McGinnis Venture Competition pitch allowed insights into the business side of the product, including future monetization strategies, key factors investors look for in a product or business, and the potential of our idea.

Presented idea to stakeholders in the Carnegie Mellon University McGinnis Venture Competition as finalist
Launched newest feature on Pathfinder’s website and notified subscribers via newsletter