Visual Pathways - VR Career Exploration

‍background 📖

Project Overview

During my last Winter Quarter @ UCSD I enrolled in a course where we created a product for students to use VR to explore careers they might've never imagined going after.
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Team:Alexa A., Sydney T., Jana B., and Bryan B.
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Tools: Figma, Google Forms

Scope: UI/UX Design, User Research, User Testing, Interviews, and Product Presentation
Timeline: January -  March 2023
My Role: I worked as co-lead UX/Ul Designer and User Researcher for the development of this product.

Market research

The social context

My team and I were interested in creating a product that would combine the use of VR and career exploration so we conducted research on there joint topics and this is what we found:

In today's job market, a staggering 70% of American workers find themselves unsatisfied with their career choices, a condition that emphasizes an issue of career misalignment and dissatisfaction. The modern professional is expected to change careers an average of 5-7 times during their working life, showing a significant gap in career exploration and decision-making processes. 

We wanted to create a way to minimize this early on when people usually start making these life changing decisions, which is why our target social setting would be a high school or early college career fair.

problem statement

how might we...

Help students explore unimaginable career paths through the use of VR while connecting them with real industry professionals.

user research

lets find out what the people think

Our main objectives were to explore the perspectives of college students, a high school student, and an industry professional regarding the potential benefits of virtual reality (VR) job shadowing in career search and collaboration opportunities

We conducted semi-structured interviews consisting of  8-10 questions on 2 college students, 1 high schooler, and 1 industry professional. The following are some of the questions we asked:
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💻Do you think ‘shadowing’ a job via virtual reality would be beneficial in your career search?
👩🏽🏫 In what ways would it be beneficial? (Student)
👷🏻Would you be interested in collaborating on a VR job shadowing experience related to your field? Why or why not? (Industry Professional)

user research results

we learned there are 3 common themes that matter to both parties : organization, co-location and technical skills and interest

“In my high school career fair… lines were really long. There wasn’t a lot of time to have 1:1 conversations with any of the professionals." - Fiona (UCSD Undergraduate)

“I  think having the option to do both [shadowing in person and VR] would be awesome, but I think it’s crucial to be able to do it [shadowing] in person.” - Taj (HS Senior)

our solution

the target of our app

Visual Pathways directly tackles the challenge of career dissatisfaction through an immersive VR platform that builds upon conventional career guidance methods. By simulating real-life work experiences across various industries, it allows students to explore and understand different career paths through virtual reality while still having that in-person connection they crave. This innovative approach helps to demystify job roles and spark interest in various fields by offering students a unique look of the potential career guided by an industry professional. It makes career exploration interactive and engaging, enabling students to better understand their preferences and make informed decisions about their future, minimizing future career changes and dissatisfaction. 

competitive analysis

what does our competition do that we could do better

After doing we research we found that these were the closest existing products: Transfr, CareerLabsVR, and CareerVillage and together we created goals that our product would try to achieve using the competition as our guidelines.

our design process

Using what we learned we created a user flow and lo-fi sketches for the app portion of our product

first iteration of prototyping

what did our participants think during our live prototyping session

One part of the development of this product included participating in a live prototyping session where we demo'ed what a real session of product would look like in an ideal social setting of a career fair where we would then receive feedback from our "participants" and class IA's on what we could improve on for the next session.

We had 20 users and this is what the process looked like:

1. Take a personality and career matching quiz created by us
2. Students then were given 3 top careers they would most likely be interested and were directed to watch the VR demo videos independently (sourced from Transfr) that accompanied the results
3. They then joined the slack channel that belonged to each of the career groups where they could get in touch with the recruiter for each career.
4. Students then decided on the 1 career they were most interested in learning more about from the 3 VR demo videos and went to a table at the "career fair" where they met with the recruiter of their choosing to complete "aptitude tests"

second iteration of prototyping

incorporating feedback

  • In prototype 1, we were limited to careers that already has VR demo videos. For Prototype 2, we changed the careers to be more relevant because we no longer prorotypes the VR experience as a video, but rather as an interaction

‍👥 career options are not relevant👔🔍

‍🥽 VR experience lacked interaction👔🔍

  • Our first prototype had the VR demos as an independent task. This excluded recruiters from being able to interact with the students as they went along the demo. For our second prototype, we had students and recruiters enter the VR environment together to complete the aptitude tasks

‍💻make beneficial for recruiters👔🔍

  • Our first prototype was not obviously beneficial to the recruiters. For our second prototype, we had recruiters using VR to complete the aptitude tasks and also had the recruiters select their standout students at the end. This enables recruiters to actually find people interested in the field and showing early talent.

👥 career options are not relevant
‍• In prototype 1, we were limited to careers that already has VR demo videos. For prototype 2, we changed the careers to be more relevant because we no longer chose to pttotope the VR experience as a video, but rather as an interaction.

🥽 VR experience lacked interaction
‍• Our first prototype had the VR demos as an independent task. This excluded recruiters from being able to interact with the students as they went along the demo. For our second prototype, we had students and recruiters enter the VR environment together to complete the aptitude tasks.

💻make beneficial for recruiters
‍• Our first prototype was not beneficial to the "recruiters" in our demo. Therefore, for our second prototype we played as the recruiters
(those that would be on the VR headset) and created aptitude tasks relating to each profession where the students would participate and and at the end had the recruiters select their standout students at the end. This enables recruiters to actually find people interested in the field and showing early talent.

protoype session 2

the new prototype session went like this

1. Students filled out the career matching quiz once again
2. After finding out their top 2 matches they joined a slack channel where they were able to join and introduce themselves to their fellow peers
3. We then had them to go their 1st matchs’ table to do the VR walkthrough which was essentially an aptitude test where the student and recruiter could converse about the job
4. Then after 5 minutes they did a rotation of the same thing with their 2nd match
5. After this process the “recruiter” reached out to the top candidate from their session to show interest in furthering the network connection

final prototype

Our final product after our prototyping session with the career fair set as our social setting

Account and Room Code Set Up

Our product is designed to be used during social settings like career fairs hosted by high schools. The first step for the student is to join their school's fair using a private key code.

Career Quiz + Matching

After they join their room, they are prompted to take a career matching quiz that gauges their interests. They are then shown their top 3 career matches and this creates a schedule for them that they then follow in-person at the career fair.

In-Person and VR Engagement

As they go through their curated schedule they follow the steps prompted through the app and engage in both VR and in-person engagement. This process gets repeated as they go through all three recruiter experiences.

Recruiter Follow-Ups

Another part of our mission was for this process to be equally beneficial for the recruiter so after the meetings the recruiter can show mutual interest in the candidate and this allows them to follow each other.