The Livelihood Future Skill Lab Project is a web portal aiming to bring together theoretical research and practical training to help individuals build careers that are sustainable and resilient to future changes.

Tools

Figma
Adobe Creative Suite

Livelihood Project Inc. is a non-profit organization that began its journey in 2016 with a mission to discover how future skills development will append future career paths. It started with a bottom-up approach by running a cafe in Kensington Market staffed by refugees and newcomers learning digital business skills.

Now moving to the next phase, our project partner is looking to broaden its influence by introducing this online platform to better bridge theoretical future skill research with practical applications, and eventually help people advance in their future careers.

In this four-month capstone project working together with Livelihood, I collaborated with four teammates (Chu Li, Vicky Yao, Chris Xie, Janice Hu) to build this web project from scratch.

I was actively involved in all design phases, from conducting interviews to synthesizing research results. I also led the visual design creating most of the slide show, customer journey map, and the UX/UI design of the clickable prototype.

Our Design Process

Understanding Business Goals

We initiated our project by having two kick-off meetings with the founder of Livelihood Inc. – Parin Kothari. The informative conversation helped us understand the business model, target audience, and value proposition of the organization.

Regarding the three-phase development plan of the Project, the Future Skill Lab is currently at Step 2, with a business goal to create an enriching platform that will help people stay informed about future skills, and eventually reach a greater audience and gain more organization buy-ins.

Who are our potential users?

In order to create a higher-level impact, our project partner aims to focus on professionals as the target user group, including analysts and researchers working for governments, corporates, funding organizations, and universities.

This brought us a challenge in conducting the initial user research since it was hard to locate possible interviewees. We managed to solve the issue by sending rounds of cold emails (45 in total) on LinkedIn and luckily, got 8 responses for both initial research and user testing. We were able to gather some of the most insightful inputs from these manager-level leaders in the future skill field.

Persona

From the interview answers we gathered, the team built the persona of Naomi, who works as a research analyst for a think tank. Naomi is deeply concerned about social fairness issues and wants to get herself as well as others prepared for the future job market.

Define Problem and Design Strategy

The team concluded four main pain points that are most troubling for users in their current journey and came up with correspondent design solutions to improve on those points.

Low-fi prototype

We completed the first round of low-fi prototyping in Figma. Internally, we used team voting as a method to agree on design solutions. The design was also approved by project partner before moving to the next phase.

Usability Testing

Cognitive Walkthroughs

To validate our design, we did 3 user testing with our target user group. Since we want to test the whole site with several different flows, the team decided to use the cognitive walkthrough method for time and cost efficiency.

The success metrics we used were qualitative, focusing on whether the users would consider contacting livelihood Inc. based on the website walkthrough, matching the business goal to broadcast Livelihood Inc. to a greater audience and build potential long-term relationships.