Ignite by Adecco / 2015

Wayfind: building a career-pathing app

An illustration of two characters looking up at the stars. The Wayfind logo sits in the sky.
Problem

Employees at enterprise-level companies were having trouble understanding what career options were available to them. This was leading to employee frustration and higher attrition levels.

Result

We built and launched Wayfind, an app to help employees map out a career path at their company. At the time of my leaving, Wayfind was being piloted with a few Adecco enterprise-level clients.

My Role

Strategy, Design Facilitation, UX Design, Visual Design, User Research, Front-End Development

One of the many ideas born from our team at Ignite by Adecco was Wayfind, an app to help employees discover career opportunities at their company. Once an employee selected a desired role, the app would help them explore various paths to reach their desired destination.

Validating the problem and investigating challenges

Functioning in 1-week sprints, we conducted user interviews, built prototypes, and ran experiments to test various unknowns. The main questions we were looking to address in this initial discovery phase were:

  1. Problem validation: Is this really a problem for employees of big companies?
  2. Onboarding: Can we get the information we need to provide meaningful recommendations without losing people in the process?
  3. Email engagement: Can we entice employees to take action from an HR email?
  4. Sales: Is our product appealing to HR executives?

We received a strong enough signal from each of these research areas to move forward with the next phase of product development.

A comp of the Wayfind jobs directory
Smart career recommendations. We are currently rolling out the third iteration of Wayfind. After completing a short onboarding process, users are given career recommendations based on their personality, background, and areas of interest.

Each role card is scored relative to the user's personality, education, experience, and skills.
The whole picture. Clicking on a role card reveals more information about the role as well as an in-depth score breakdown and possible career paths. We want to give the user enough data to determine if this role is a potential fit for them, now or in the future. Breaking the score into intrinsic and extrinsic measures gives the user a more realistic sense of their compatibility with a role regardless of readiness. We want people thinking not only about their next job, but about planning their future career path as well.
A comp of the job detail page
A comp of the career-pathing part of the app
From A to B. Once a user has identified a role that they like, Wayfind will walk them through the process of creating a plan to get there.

After launching the MVP, we onboarded three enterprise-level companies as test pilots. Our biggest challenge was collecting clean, organized data from the companies. Most did not have roles organized in a global way. Instead, there were vast inconsistencies across departments by level and naming structure. This would prove to be the biggest obstacle for Wayfind. At the time of my leaving, Wayfind was in its third iteration and they were still having issues with the massive data challenge of onboarding new companies.

Thank Yous

Danilo Quilaton & Jason Kellum UX, Visual Design & Front-End Development

Ian Fiske Data Science & Strategy

Mark Montroy Full Stack Development

Sean Paley Product Management & Strategy

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