Myco is aimed to become the primary creative career building platform for all SCAD students and helps all the students to achieve prominent career goals. Through Myco, each SCAD student will have a clear view of what they could do step by step to build a successful career. Also, different types of information like recruiting information and professional field events will delivery to targeted students based on what they need in order to motivate them to be initiative. This platform demonstrate the cohesive power of SCAD and creates more and more creative career opportunities for students.
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Although SCAD has a good connection with the creative industry and has a large number of resources available to students, students often find it tough and challenging to find jobs and internships, despite the vast amount of information published from school side. It's hard for the student to find useful information all the time through existing channels. There is an enormous need for SCAD platform to improve on delivering information to student efficiently.
Since our product is focally designed for serving SCAD student, we did quantitative survey and conducted
in-depth interviews which involves students in different phases and majors, professors, alumni and SCAD career service department to understand the problems and pains they have and their needs and desires. We participated in relevant activities like Career Fair, SCAD Pro unveiling, Alumni panel discussions, and Club events like Uber designer’s sharing workshop to observe and interview the participants. Here are three key findings :
Most of the students do not treat career building as a long-term process. They usually wait until the last moment to find jobs. Then they realized that they haven’t prepared well for opportunities
Lot of students do not have a clear goal of where to go because they did not do enough research about the field and companies. They need to have experiences to figure out what are their interests and their goal.
There are plenty of recruiting website on the market. SCAD also deliver different type of informations to students in different ways. The overwhelmed information makes it difficult for students to screening and find the useful ones.
According to the results of competitor analysis, users research and when user using products or services from our competitors and interviews with people involved, we analyzed and summarized the results of all above information by using the value proposition model. It shown customer jobs, their pains and what they want to gain. It also led us analyze corresponding things, product value, like what product/service and features MyCO should provide, pain reliever and gain creator.
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After understood users and context, analyzed competitors and synthesized all the information, we found out three main design goals: help students to perfecting self-building, bring high quality field information to students and build the connection between students and the professional field.
Motivate student to be initiative to create and execute their professional plan and achieve the career goal step by step.
Feed the latest and hottest field information. Help them to explore the industry and find their passionate area. Understand their targeted organizations and keep up to date with them.
Display the talents to the industry. Involve students into career related activities to build the connections between students and the industry. Encourage students to get more into the field to test their career goals and build the network.
Fig. Cardsorting with Potential Users
Portfolio display
Student need a place or a platform to put and display their digital portfolios for easily showing to other people, like other students, others in creative industry and companies that you want to apply. On the other hand, people also need to browse others displayed portfolios to get some inspiration.
Targeted recruiting
information delivery There are many recruiting websites can provide recruiting information, but people have to filter all of relevant information on these websites by themselves. The more convenient and efficient way for people is receiving the recruiting information directly, which has specially selected for their own needs.
Field information
update 24 hours a day, seven days a week, people can continuously get your field related updates, which include latest news, technologies, conferences, articles and competitions. You can check them every time you want, and know what’s happening in the world now.
Career network building
One of the most important thing for your career, is to build up your own career network that can help you working, changing job and even finding a new job more smoothly and easily. However, many people don’t have an appropriate occasion or chance to meet many different people.
Minimal apply process
To be honestly, existed apply process is complex and multiple. There are many different things that need to be submitted for appliers when they want to apply for a job. Even some of portfolio website or recruiting websites can handle some of your document, but you still have to package them by yourself, so they are trying to simplify this process for users. Nevertheless, if people can apply for jobs just by clicking a button, it will be very convenient and efficient.
On campus event
For many successful websites, them have many useful information and amazing functions, but lack of the off-line part. The most direct and efficient way for people to communicate, is still face to face talking with each other. So, for students, if there is some on campus activities combined with the online things, it will be better, like student’s clubs, workshop, panel discussion, alumni on campus speech, etc.
Profile
Many students don’t know the style and correct structure of a formal profile. It is very important to provide some templet for them or assist them to deal with the profile, and you also may see some others’ profiles if people setting the limit of authority is public. The profile can include not only things you uploaded, but some further information from system recording and history.
Action plan
Sometimes, students are not quite clear what should they do about their career at different periods of time. The action plan can help them to deal with these problems. Each group of student has their own plan, because at varying time, it is very differently that things should be emphasized and viewed about career preparing. If students can work it out pretty well, it will be very helpful.
Comment
People love to exchange information or opinions with others, so if there is a platform showing others’ projects, people will like to post comments under it, which is a way to communicate with author. Except the comments, people also want to know how many people like your project.
Skill set
display When you seeking a job, you should let the employer know what skills you have. In some cases, students don’t know how to show skills they have. At here, students can display their skills and connect these with their own project that they used. Students also can upload their processing photos to show their skills.
From all the researches and analysis, what services and features MyCO should provide on the platform be clarified. This infographic illustrates MyCO structure and shows the level of information. This step helps to better organized the data and information into delivery and also lead to the next step: wire-frame design.
MyCO, Meet Your Career Opportunity.
Depends on information architecture to translate feature and function into website structure.
Based on the color scheme and the slogan, a series of logo be created. Here is the final version. Target user are SCAD students who are young, energetic and creative. Tried to create a playful brand, since doing playful is an important part of innovation.
To test whether the brand identity that we trying to express is consistent with the image that users received, we showed the information architecture, interface and logo of our platform to users without any explanation. We let them to describe what they think about the functions, mission, target users and operator of our platform, completely according to their own understanding.
Although we narrowed this platform specifically for art and design students in SCAD because creative portfolio display is very different from other jobs, the differences between each major is still a problem.
We also aimed to use Myco as a platform to showcase the cohesive talent of SCAD. But, through the currently design, it served more for students. It not attractive enough for recruiters who are looking for talented students.
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