Making Sound

Career Decisions

Acumen + IDEO HCD Course

UX Folks

How might we counsel young

teens in India towards probable
career options?

Problems faced
UX Folks

Lack of credible information to support a career

decision is the major problem faced by students.
Peer pressure, herd mentality and economic stability
have maximum influence on decision making.
Students often dont get a chance to seek professional
guidance for making career decisions.

What we knew

What We Knew
UX Folks

Students are influenced by their peers and relatives to

a large extent and career paths are often imposed on

them.
The decisions that they take are difficult to change at a
later stage due to education system.

Students trust experts and teachers more than their

parents.

Conducting Research
UX Folks

People:

Experts to speak to:

People we chose to be a part of

our research included a parent
group, counsellor and teacher and
students from different age groups.

We selected NGOs and

School Principal just to take a
bird eye view of how they
approach to this problem and
what can be the key
takeaways from them.
We also selected
entrepreneurs to have a look
at how they made decisions.

In-Context Immersions
We observed people involved
in important decision making
processes and in various
counselling sessions.

Analogous Inspiration:
We thought marriage
Counselling or buying a
product could be the
analogous locations for our
design challenge as both these
tasks involve choosing the
right path and making n
important decision.
UX Folks

What we learnt
UX Folks

Theme: Motivation
Kids prefer career options that provide
economic stability due to the cultural
and economic setup in India.
Kids are highly influenced by teachers
and elder siblings while making career
decisions.
Kids are forced to a career based on
their academic grades.

UX Folks

Theme: Guidance
A large number of kids dont receive
proper counselling.

Kids are more prone to listen to the

guidance of people who have been
through the same phase and have
been successful.
Early guidance is needed to incline
towards a career of their choice.

UX Folks

Theme: Frustration
Kids often make decision under
pressure from parents or peers.
Lack of credible information leads to
confusion in kids who are already
tensed.

UX Folks

Key Insights
Kids are highly influenced by teachers and
elder siblings.
A large number of kids don't receive proper council
at the right time.
A lot of unnecessary and false information often leads
to confusion in kids.

UX Folks

How Might We Questions

UX Folks

How might we educate chief

influencers to properly guide kids in
making a sound career decision?

How might we counsel young teens

towards probable career options?

How might we provide reliable

information in a consolidated and easy
to understand manner?

Prototyping

Next step was to pen down our ideas and give a shape to
our solution. With each added sketch and post-it we made
progress towards solidifying our solution. Storyboarding

made us visualize the whole idea and bring everyone on the

same page.

Experiences storyboarded were

Person
Awareness

Seeking Information
Asking and Answering Questions
Requesting/Joining meet ups
Attending a meet up

UX Folks

Person
Kamal, 15, is one of the probable user of our

portal. Hes a 10th class student, a gamer,

social media enthusiast, smart, and an
extrovert. He is well in touch with technology
and internet.

UX Folks

Awareness
He gets to know about our services via
a workshop he attended in school.

His teacher also recommended to view

this website.
Currently seeking guidance about his
career options he decides to check the

website.
UX Folks

Seeking Information
He comes to the portal and is searches

about the career options hes interested

and consumes the information.

UX Folks

UX Folks

Asking/Answering Questions
He looks for what people are saying about the

subject stream and the questions asked related to it.

He gets to know what people think about the same
via discussions and the experiences shared by
people who have been in same situations or are
currently in. Comment he reads, are generally made

by students, employees, counsellors, teachers and

parents.
UX Folks

UX Folks

Request/Join a meet up
While reading about careers and what people
say he comes across the meet-up groups in his
city that are arranged by the students or
counsellors mainly who intend to address the
problems face by students in making career

decisions. He looks for such meet-ups and

decide to join one. If not found, he decides to
create a meet-up group to lead as the system
allows him.
UX Folks

UX Folks

Attending the meet-up

He meets students and parents who are dealing
with same issues. Talking and listening to such
a group of people clears his mind, informs and
educates him through the problem. Counsellors

are also the part of meet-ups so that they can

guide and promote their business as well.

UX Folks

UX Folks

Testing

We got our solution tested by a number of

youngsters. Most of our users approved our solution.
They were really excited about the meet-up idea.
Some users wanted the interface to be really
interactive, so we made
a number of iterations to address that issue and we
came up with the final product.
We got it tested again and we got a go ahead from all
of them.

UX Folks

UX Folks

Moving Ahead

With our prototypes tested and iterated we are ready

to move forward to our digital product.
With a vision to have an impact on our target users we
are building this solution to bring a major change in
the way students look at their careers.

We are looking forward to iterate a bit more so that we

can present it to other people who can help us bring
the change.

Moving Ahead
Team UX Folks

UX Folks