Scoutible

Gamifying the Job Seeking Experience

My Role

As one of three designers, I collaborated with the team to carry out user research and synthesis. I led the UI design process, transforming strategies into iterative designs that shaped our final high-fidelity prototypes. Additionally, I managed client communications, ensuring alignment on expectations and project timelines.

Project Details

Client: Scoutible

Role (3-person team): UX/ UI Designer

Duration: 3 weeks (March 2020)

Platform: Mobile

Tools: Sketch, Google forms, Miro, pen & paper

Overview

Scoutible seeks to revolutionize the hiring/job seeking process by highlighting candidates’ soft skills to show their potential beyond hard skills & experience.

Scoutible is a startup leveraging immersive mobile games to identify ideal job candidates based on soft skills. Rooted in extensive research, their games provide job seekers with insights to enhance self-awareness and strengthen their resumes. With the launch of their mobile app, Scoutible aims to gamify soft skill discovery, enabling candidates to create a "Strengths Resume"—a holistic representation of their abilities to improve the hiring process for both job seekers and employers.

The Challenge

After launching their app's beta version, Scoutible noticed low conversion rates and weak engagement with their key offering, the Strengths Resume. To understand the drop in user engagement, they sought insights into user behavior. Our research revealed key friction points at the final stage of the user journey:

Lack of social proof: Users aren’t certain that using the Strengths Resume in their job searches will help bolster their candidacy. Since Scoutible’s offering is a novel concept, users might be hesitant to utilize it in their job search.
Unclear Offerings: At the end of the user journey, unclear language describing identified soft skills caused user confusion that made it difficult for users to relate to their Strengths Resume and find value in it in order to use it in their job searches.

Goal: How might we redesign Scoutible’s platform to help potential users better understand Scoutible’s offerings in order to improve their conversion and engagement rates?

Solution

Focusing on the end of the user flow, where users receive their soft skills results and Strengths Resume, we made recommendations to improve the flow, enhance information hierarchy, and ensure continuity in gamification throughout the entire experience.

Ensuring user’s identified soft skills (“star qualities”) are relatable

Star Qualities Results Page

Adjusting the language to describe identified Star Qualities to help users better understand and relate to their identified soft skills. With improved relatability, users can be encouraged to access the Strengths Resume to learn more.

Using gamification and increasing personalization to encourage user interaction with the Strengths Resume

Strengths Resume

I redesigned the Strengths Resume to create a more engaging user experience, allowing users to add/subtract identified Star Qualities and input their own skills and work experience. By revising the copy and optimizing the mobile layout, the design better conveys that this resume is an interactive, dynamic document for job seekers to actively engage with

Research and Discovery

Scoutible’s UXR

Scoutible shared existing user research with our team, which identified their target audience as females aged 20-35. While previous studies provided insights into engagement rates and demographics, they sought my team’s help in uncovering deeper understanding of specific user personas and behaviors to inform the next iterations of their product.

Who are our users?

We identified two target user groups and created personas for better visualization on their needs, frustrations, and motivations. We used these personas to concentrate our solutions on serving two main types of professionals that Scoutible seeks to appeal to.

Aspiring Professional

Graduated from university with a major in communications and is now looking for job opportunities
Seeking a Sales Development Representative role, but she isn’t having much luck.
Open to work at any company where she feels she fits in with its culture and her co-workers.

Efficient Professional

Self-disciplined and likes to stick to her daily routine of work, exercise, and family time.
During her downtime, she plays popular mobile phone games, but she strays away from astrology and trendy personality tests
Been self-studying computer science & coding and is looking to change in to a tech career

Understanding User Behaviors

We surveyed 55 people (75% female) about their current jobseeking experiences and attitudes towards mobile games/personality tests. Based on the results, we were able to identify user motivations/behaviors and some main obstacles in a job search.

Key Insights

75%

of respondents felt one of the most frustrating parts of their job searches was: “employers can’t see my personality strengths”

60%

of respondents think soft skills are an important part of the job application but don’t know how to identify them

90%

of respondents doubt the accuracy of personality tests

Opportunities

How can we appeal to users and demonstrate the value prop of Scoutible?

Scoutible’s Strengths Resume highlights a candidates soft skills, allowing job seekers to show their potential beyond hard skills and experiences
Scoutible can appeal as a tool for individuals that want to learn about their soft skills
Emphasizing how Scoutible’s research creates effective and accurate results in comparison to the standard personality test may stimulate engagement

“Results and descriptions are a bit too complimentary…makes it hard to relate to.”

"I think the results are pretty accurate! It reaffirms qualities I perceive about myself!"

“The initial description is spot on, but it’s kind of vague and generalized. The Star Qualities terminology is confusing.”

How do users feel about the Strengths Resume at the end of the experience?

We conducted moderated testing with three female participants aged 21–25, followed by in-depth interviews. Participants were asked to complete the entire user journey, including account creation, gameplay, and accessing the Strengths Resume. Mixed feelings from our users surrounding the end of the user journey helped us to identify a key area for improvement—the results page.

Competitive Analyses

Analyzing competitors provided valuable insights into the market and existing offerings. This research enhanced our understanding of effective approaches for identifying soft skills and successfully engaging users.

Good & Co.

Soft skills assessment tool

Design Patterns

Gamification: Competitor (Good & Co.) set user expectations by utilizing progress bars to provide valuable feedback in reducing user uncertainty, offer reasons to engage with the product, and reduce users’ perspective of time
Intrinsic Rewards: Both competitors surfaced identified personality insights that were easy to understand and relate to at the end of the experience, rewarding users for their effort spent taking assessments.
Continued Motivation: Successful competitors (Human Intelligence) offer additional games, related job listings, and work behavior recommendations to further promote engagement and close the feedback loop

Human Intelligence

Self-assessment for culture fit

Define

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Affinity Mapping: Understanding User Motivations

By organizing the information collected from our survey, we were able to discover the key motivations and insights behind user behaviors to inform our strategy on how to address the problem.

Key Insights

People are willing to take personality tests, but doubt the results' accuracy
People prefer to play simple, object-clearing puzzle mobile games out of convenience and boredom
People are motivated to share personality tests and Buzzfeed quiz results for external validation
Linkedin and job boards were the most popular job searching tools- people value professional networking and accessible job listings

Pinpointing the problem space

Our testing results revealed opportunities for improvement across almost all stages of the user journey. I created journey maps to define and prioritize our design decisions. We observed highest levels of dissatisfaction in the Results and Strengths Resume stages for both target users.

Targeting Users’ Pain Points

We synthesized our findings to draw some conclusions about user patterns and use insight to strategize our approach to developing a solution.

Users need to be properly incentivized throughout their entire experience

We found that Scoutible was losing user engagement because of the unmet expectations. With such a novel concept like a game-based soft-skill identifier, there was a disconnect between the amount of effort required from the user and the perceived benefits of the experience.

Users find confidence in accuracy and relatability

In order for Scoutible to present value, users need to feel empowered by the end of the experience. That means that users are able to reaffirm qualities they knew about themselves as well as reveal new insights.

Design

Using identified user needs to redesign the product to better serve them

Preliminary Sketches

I sketched out some basic design ideas of potential app improvements—taking into account key insights from the research before developing higher fidelity wireframes in Sketch.

Final Design

Game Results Page: Incentivizing Users

Refined the language for Star Qualities and highlighted the top three soft skills to boost user relatability and engagement. To encourage continued interaction with the Strengths Resume, we added a progress bar, extending the gamified experience.

Strengths Resume: Increasing Personalization

Kept the Strengths Resume within the app to maintain user engagement.
Enhanced personalization options, allowing users to customize their resumes to reflect their unique strengths. Users can highlight relevant Star Qualities, search and add skills, and showcase key experiences.
Integrated the progress bar into the avatar for seamless gamification continuity.
Optimized the Strengths Resume for mobile by implementing collapsible sections, improving user experience on smaller screens.

Deliver

Client Handoff

My team and I presented our project in its entirety to Scoutible’s CEO and CTO. We presented our user research and insights, walked through our wireframes, and explained the rationale behind our proposed UX/UI changes that we found would be most beneficial to Scoutible’s goals.

Our designs and findings were well received by the Scoutible team and they found a lot of useful insights in our approach and research. Given the short project timeline, they were pleased with the outcome and excited to apply our recommendations to guide their product’s next phase.

Design Process Research Define Design Deliver

Usability testing on design recommendations
More iterations of UX design solutions to ensure engagement throughout the whole experience
Further user research on both the Aspiring Professional & the Efficient Professional in order to confirm our assumptions

Challenges

COVID- 19 The social distancing rules for COVID-19 forced our team to convert to full-time remote working with each other and our client. We had technology to help aid us in our communication and collaboration, but nothing beat the efficiency of working in person. We did affinity mapping through Miro, which actually took double the amount of time it takes to use post-it notes and whiteboards in person. User interviews and testing were greatly affected in terms of having limited access to participants and not being able to observe a user’s senses beyond the screen.
Delays on consumer-facing app release The allocated research time, within the tight 3-week design timeline, was pushed back and greatly reduced our time for design and testing.

Achievements

My team and I adapt to a completely virtual work style quickly to produce high-quality design solutions for Scoutible.
Changed plan of action to accommodate app release delays in order to generate valuable insights on target users and design recommendations by the deadline.
Scoutible released their app 3 days before our design deadline; my team and I switched back to the original direction to produce the design deliverables and strategies we had previously planned for.
Delivered all design deliverables requested by client: user personas, user flow w/ low- to mid-fidelity wireframes, UXR repaort w/ qualitative & quantitative insights on Scoutible demographic.