I was the team leader of this project, delegating tasks to team members, overseeing their progress and giving feedback, and leading the overall design direction.
Conducted market research and demonstrated product thinking to lead the design direction and determine product features
Launched an advertising campaign and recruited participants for user testing of an MVP
Apr - Jun 2023 (10 weeks)
Academic project - team of 5 designers
Figma, Google Forms, Google Ads, Unbounce
TeamFactor is a startup concept. It aims to help job seekers get discovered by employers based on automated assessments of online small group problem-solving sessions. Job seekers are able to see insights on how they performed which are then also shown to employers, allowing job seekers to show their skills beyond just their resume and portfolio.
Even in 2023, the world has not fully recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects are apparent in the social landscape. People struggled to maintain their connections over the pandemic, causing disconnectedness and social anxiety. Now, there is less face-to-face interaction as remote work and remote learning still persist.
There is a need for fostering and maintaining relationships in one's social life, and here are some questions we asked to explore this idea.
How might we provide an environment where people can feel more comfortable with connecting with others?
How might we provide more opportunities for new people to meet each other and expand their network?
A list of social trends in 2023
The competitive analysis included apps targeted for making new connections outside of regular social media and messaging services. We noticed that existing apps that focused on making new friends weren’t so successful because they didn’t reach a critical mass of users.
Asking strangers about their experiences with strangers
We surveyed and interviewed individuals from multiple countries and age groups and asked them in-depth questions about how they socialize and maintain connections with others. These quotes summarized the core themes that were brought up.
"Getting involved in hobbies groups, local events, and meeting up regularly.”
Quinton, 25
“Nothing really. It mainly needs willingness from people to connect.”
Linda, 52
"Having a common interest with someone makes me more confident and sociable.”
Becky, 25
Early ideas for our product capitalized on the insights that we generated - we believed that there was a sufficient product opportunity gap for a social app to match people with similar interests, and then provide them suggestions on activities to do together.
But, there was a gap
I realized that we didn’t look at the mainstream socializing apps and services at all. For example, Facebook Events and Eventbrite facilitate people going together to events. This was already a very saturated space in which our competitors would be far too established and popular already. From the competitive analysis, apps that didn't reach a critical mass of users weren't successful, and I believed our idea wasn't unique enough to attract enough users.
Let's talk about strengths
Therefore, I pivoted the design direction into fostering professional connections and user-generated content instead, which also addressed other social trends. User-generated creative content via platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch is extremely popular. On top of that, professional sports and eSports also garner millions of viewers worldwide.
People like watching others who are skilled at something, and it inspires them to improve.
I applied that thinking to the job market, which was (and still is) a relevant struggle for many in the tech industry recently. There is the same desire to form connections with peers and professionals in hopes to gain friendship, advice, and opportunities. In order to stand out from other candidates, job seekers must also become experts in their discipline. But because each job opening is so competitive, employers give job seekers very little chance to showcase their skills beyond just their resume and portfolio.
As such, our overarching HMW question transitioned into:
How might we provide a way for job seekers to network, hone their skills, and gain a competitive advantage in order to help them get concrete opportunities in their job search?
Since we switched to a new product space, we conducted another round of competitive analysis, looking at 6 products that addressed the areas of networking, collaboration, skill development, and evaluation. While they were all relevant to the HMW question in some way, one product called Forage caught our eyes for its industry-standard projects, allowing job seekers to hone their skills, earn certificates, and gain visibility to employers all at no cost. This served as a big inspiration for our new idea.
A key insight from this analysis was that skill development can take forms in individual or collaborative ways, and they can both be successful.
TeamFactor takes skill development to the next level by blending in collaboration and evaluation. The platform hosts real-time group problem solving sessions in which participants receive industry-standard problems specific to the companies they are interested in. By combining peer evaluations and the power of AI, participants will receive an evaluation of their performance during the session, which companies will be able to see.
How someone who wants to work at Google would use TeamFactor
The idea of TeamFactor was born from the intersection of our previous research on fostering social connections and the second competitive analysis. As the analysis showed that products meant for individuals or collaboration were both successful, we decided to incorporate a collaborative aspect into our idea. This was also supported by our research insights from earlier, when people mentioned that they felt comfortable when others shared similar interests as them.
TeamFactor aims to add value to individuals by facilitating their efforts to break into the industry. By providing a way for individuals to show how they would work in a company setting, they present a more relevant set of skills that employers would be able to see.
After the pivot, the project was already over its halfway point, so we used other methods in order to gauge interest and gain feedback for this new product idea. I created landing pages using Unbounce in order to get conversions and set up a Google Ads campaign running parallel to it, as well as made a post on LinkedIn.
The results
The ad campaign was successful and the overall conversion rate on our site was 24.1%, which was higher than average compared to other landing pages for SaaS products. By including phrases in our keywords such as "to get a job" or "how to get work", we were able to make lots of impressions with these ads because those were common search terms.
The next step we took was to create an MVP of this experience since we were a startup concept and collect user feedback. Although the ad campaign had good results, it was important to see if the collaborative aspect of this idea brought value to users, as existing solutions focused more on personal career development. So, we created several design prompts and challenged the participants to generate a design solution in 30 minutes.
Since the idea relies on advanced technology and AI which we were not able to develop, our team members sat in and observed the session in place of that and took notes on each participant's behavior. The MVP was also decidedly lacking any user interface prototypes and was more focused on the experience of working in diverse teams on an industry-specific project and receiving feedback. The 3 participants were recruited from the email sign-ups from the landing page, none of whom we knew beforehand.
After completing the session, we instructed each participant to join a breakout room in our Zoom meeting, in which we relayed to them the notes that we took. This was to simulate the part where participants would view their performance evaluations.
The Miro board which they used to collaborate on
Behavioral notes
Excerpt of post-activity survey
Analyzing user feedback
Overall, the MVP testing session was successful - the participants collaborated on ideation and came up with a proposed solution to the problem. Through this, we were able to observe behaviors that uncovered some interesting insights that we wouldn't have discovered otherwise.
The participants were slow to get started on their work when presented with an empty whiteboard.
Ease them into the activity by having icebreakers and provide some templates to get them started.
One participant was too overbearing and dominated the conversation.
It would be beneficial to have a way to intervene during collaboration sessions.
The participants consisted of solely designers, leading to a desire of having interdisciplinary team members.
Offer flexibility when picking roles of teammates and also the length of the project.
With only one week left at this point to finish the final designs, we did our best to make screens for as many of the features as possible. Below are the final high-fidelity designs for TeamFactor.
Profile page which shows basic info and previous projects
Scorecard after completing a project
Library of educational resources
Self-paced learning supplemental to projects
Select from a variety of industry-standard projects
View the details of any specific project
This project taught me how to think more entrepreneurially and from a business perspective because the goal was to create a novel startup concept. It took us a while to get off our feet because it took a long time to find a solid idea and then test our MVP, which left little time for final UI designs. In order to accomplish this, I would conduct a more thorough competitive analysis right from the start in order to better identify a product opportunity gap.
Given more time, I would also want to improve on the MVP by supplementing it with UI prototypes. This would make our MVP feel more like a complete product and have a smoother experience. Furthermore, while the MVP testing gave us good insights, we weren't able to incorporate those insights into the designs that we did make. By having the designs finished before the MVP, I'm confident that our final designs would have been stronger.
As my first time being a team leader for a quarter-long project, I took on new responsibilities in the context of a design project such as delegating and reviewing work, leading the design direction on most aspects of the project, and having individual conversations with my team members to gauge what tasks they were comfortable and not comfortable with taking on. I learned a lot from this experience and I think that we created a very interesting startup concept. If I had the chance, I would definitely be interested in seeing if I could get this startup idea launched!
