Peel School District Career Hub serves as a specialized microsite designed to support upcoming high school graduates and parents as they navigate through the complexities of their job search journey.
Project overview
Our goal was to create a microsite that acted as an all-encompassing hub for career planning, specifically designed to cater to the varied needs of the Peel SD community. We aimed to cultivate a dynamic and supportive online space that motivates students to explore various career options, supports the parents, and allows students to make well-informed decisions about their future paths.
The approach
During our design process, we employed the Double Diamond methodology as our guiding framework. This methodology enabled us to explore and evaluate various design options while keeping our client fully informed and engaged at every step of the way. By following this approach, we were able to create a design that truly met the client's needs and exceeded their expectations.
How we...
Discover: Better understand the unique needs, desires, and behaviors of guidance counselors, teachers, parents, and students to inform our design process.
Define: Incorporate our findings from the discovery phase to clearly define and focus on the most pressing challenges faced by our target audience.
Develop: Generate and iteratively refine a wide range of ideas and solutions to identify the most promising concepts.
Deliver: Finalize and refine the microsite's design and development to ensure it is ready for launch and meets all the defined requirements of our stakeholders and target users.
Competitive Analysis
As with any project, researching the brand's competitors is critical. This can be an important step in understanding current trends, and competition while identifying what users may already be familiar with. This can also be a way to explore what not to do. For this project, clear patterns were found as I explored several school districts and education institutes to find out what should be included to create the best community for both students and parents embarking on a new career search.
Personas
We wanted to form a deeper understanding of our users' goals, needs, experiences, and behaviors. Therefore we created personas for each of our user segments: guidance counselors, teachers, social workers, high school students, and career counselors. We used these personas whenever we wanted to step out of ourselves and reconsider our initial ideas.
User flows
We created a flowchart for ‘the ask’ and ‘blue sky’ that illustrates the stages that a user must take to navigate the career site. This visual guide maps out the user journey, highlighting critical stages and decision points. The flowcharts ensured that stakeholders understood this user-centric design as a whole.
Wireframes
Using Figma, I translated my first sketches into low-fidelity wireframes. I was able to identify key areas of the site to the Peel SD stakeholders and help them visualize how the microsite would flow. After speaking with stakeholders, we were able to make informed decisions and I proceeded into the mockup stages.
Branding
Using the existing Peel ISD branding, I was able to create branding guidelines that would need to be used within the design mocks, including but not limited to a color palette, brand font, logos, buttons, and graphical elements. This branding guide should allow ease during future enhancement development.
Mockups
After presenting all of the above to the stakeholders at Peel ISD, I was able to move forward with high-fidelity mockups. These designs fulfilled all of the project requirements and met the expectations of Peel School District. The mockups received positive feedback and great excitement towards the launch.
Next steps
After a successful review with stakeholders, the design files were prepared and handed off to development to build out. The career launchpad is currently in development stages and we will be collaborating with developers to perform user acceptance testing along the way. Future education grants are in the works to build out site enhancements and a new AI tool.
The future 'Blue Sky' of Peel LaunchPad
The future state of Peel LaunchPad will include an AI tool that can offer personalized recommendations for cover letters and resumes by analyzing a student's skills, experiences, and job requirements to ensure the content is relevant and impactful. We feel incorporating an AI tool within the 'Blue Sky' approach has the potential to revolutionize how students approach career guidance, job applications, and entrepreneurship.
“Creative, collaborative, and clever, Heather is an amazing designer and colleague. Her attention to detail is impeccable, she's always calm under pressure and she has an incredible drive to offer a variety of options that ultimately lead to the perfect final product.”
— Senior Creative Copywriter, Brand Marketing